At Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Acaye Kerunen’s ‘Apoi’ marks a pivotal moment not only in the Ugandan artist’s trajectory but also within the institution’s evolving engagement with the intersections of art, craft, and social practice.
23 June 2026
Kerunen’s interdisciplinary practice resists containment. Moving between sound, textile, performance and film, she draws from indigenous knowledge systems and the labour of women’s communities in northern Uganda. Her use of organic materials such as raffia, palm fibres and found objects is not simply aesthetic but ecological and political, insisting on continuity with land and lineage. In this context, making becomes an act of listening, a way of holding memory in motion. As her first solo museum exhibition in Germany, the presentation situates Kerunen within a European context while firmly grounding her work in Uganda’s socio-cultural landscape, where indigenous textile traditions, oral histories, and community economies shape both process and meaning.
Bringing together earlier works with newly commissioned pieces, ‘Apoi’ unfolds as a site-responsive environment in which tactile, organic forms enter into dialogue with Mies van der Rohe’s austere modernism. Here, Kerunen resists inherited hierarchies that marginalise craft, instead asserting material knowledge and collective making as contemporary artistic agency. The exhibition becomes more than a display; it is a living translation of situated knowledge, carried across geographies while retaining its cultural resonance.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: Your practice is deeply embedded in Uganda’s socio-cultural context, engaging textile traditions, oral histories, and questions of labour, gender, and community economies. How do these shape the conceptual foundation of your work?
Acaye Kerunen: I have come to value materials more due to their seasonality and time-based process of labour-intensive preparations that have to be adhered to in order to produce what I need. A delay in delivery is therefore not incompetence or a lack of professionalism by the artisans I collaborate with or commission, but rather due process. Therefore, time becomes part of my value, access also becomes part of my value, and that in turn transforms the base price for me to the primary artisans. Secondly, there are the gendered expectations that come with working with artisan women. It is generally assumed that they are not intelligent enough to be artists. Alas!, In the mat rolls, for instance, that I feature in The Vunga at the Hause Lange, there are embedded codes, matrices, and other complex mathematical language which can only be reproduced by geniuses of a certain level of numerical aptitude. The Mikeka rolls, therefore, cease to be just functional but also become aesthetic and carry forward knowledge archives and scientific knowledge, which gets passed on from generation to generation through observed culture, practice and rigorous memory and mathematical sequence learning along maternal lines .
You challenge Western hierarchies that marginalise craft. How do you position indigenous knowledge and community-based production as forms of contemporary artistic agency?
The Western world likes to quickly generalise practices like mine that are rooted in maternal and heritage knowledge as frozen and immobile museum collections. As a contemporary who is continuing from my mother, I revisit these older ways of art making, like weaving, knotting, counting time through my heartbeat and breath, twining. More often, I also look for inspiration through collaborations, thereby learning what I think I know about time, process and even female empowerment. Empowerment for the female artisans I collaborate with does not look like the flag-waving kind that woke cultures sell to us on social media. Or the kind that is written about in school under gender studies . The result is my various artworks now scattered all over the world, as well as my first museum retrospective at Krefeld.
‘Apoi’ marks a pivotal moment in your practice and is your first solo museum exhibition in Germany. How do you approach this positioning within a European institutional context?
I was uneasy when the invitation for this retrospective came through from Lisa KandleHofer, my gallerist at KandleHofer Gallery in Vienna. I mean, we often run the risk of having our work boxed into a purely sociological or anthropological lens. Words like indigenous, native African (as if Europeans are not native to their lands and geospaces), traditional, etc., tend to litter texts about my work extravagantly. I am known to reject write-ups about my work that focus on such and insist on being seen and reviewed as a contemporary artist who is here now. Not a fossil that has just been rediscovered. My work is born of its aesthetic, conceptual, and critical value. Which, I guess, explains why I am here now. Seasonal flavours fade quickly. Yet I am still growing steadily in this phase. And not only a cultural ambassador. I am, yes, but it is only a small part of my identity, not a singular one.
The installation of my work also demanded some on-site presence by me and rethinking how work is usually hung at Haus Lange. I used the space to my advantage, like creating a site-specific work in The Vunga -Under the Jungle, which challenged the expected display methodologies, thus triggering dialogues and queries about ways to interact with the work. This particular installation allows audiences to sit or lie beneath it and ponder. In so doing, my contemporary voice and the institution’s historical legacy found common ground in artistic discourse.
The exhibition unfolds at Haus Lange, Mies van der Rohe’s modernist villa. How did you develop a site-responsive installation that brings your tactile, organic materials into dialogue with this architecture?
Due to its architectural design, I was inspired to respond to its historical legacy. For instance, its perfectly aligned doors allow for expansive experiences which remain contained within the same site. As such, the photographic installation and The Vunga hold dialogue through the visible frames from either end between the dangers of careless woodland practice and the harvest of a preserved wetland.
The works create an immersive environment through woven, layered, and suspended forms. How do you use material and space to engage the body and communicate lived experience?
Experiencing my works demands somatic movements like lying on your back, tilting your head back for a moment to gaze at the artistic constellations, inhaling scents that hit you, crawling on your knees to enter the womb. These spontaneous movements as responses to the work refocus attention and ground the audience into hidden memories that have been forgotten by some.
The exhibition brings together earlier works with newly commissioned pieces. How did the Krefeld context shape the development of these new works?
I was driven by the purpose to return new meaning and ways of seeing to Krefeld, considering that I am the first artist who is female, and from from Africa to ever be invited for a museum retrospective in its entire history. Ways of engaging with the same material in new ways, the sizes, and the hang were all considerations that I embodied in their making.
Film introduces a time-based narrative into the exhibition. How does this expand the storytelling already embedded in your materials?
Film has always been a part of my practice. Apoi simply reintroduced this aspect to the Western audiences. I do not ascribe to singularity in channels to storytelling. The story will often choose the medium. I simply follow in practice. Gleefully.
‘Apoi’ operates as a transnational translation of situated knowledge. How do you retain cultural specificity while allowing the work to travel across contexts?
I do this by translating the meaning I seek to infer to specific texts myself. That way, the meaning is retained and shared from a place of integrity, not just literal meaning.
This exhibition is on view at Haus Lange, at Kunstmuseen Krefeld, in Krefeld, until 6 September 2026.
