Curated by Trevor Mukholi, ‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’ invites viewers to confront Uganda’s complex past through fragmented archives, personal narratives, and the politics of memory.
Abaddu nga bakola. (A picture of the dispossessed at work.) © Canon Griffin Rumanzi
Now on view at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), ‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’ is a solo exhibition by Ugandan artist Canon Griffin Rumanzi, curated by writer and researcher Trevor Mukholi. The exhibition brings together Griffin’s layered digital collages and archival experiments to explore how Uganda’s complex histories continue to reverberate through the present.
Interweaving public documents, family photographs, and colonial imagery, Griffin constructs visual constellations that reflect the instability and fragmentation of historical memory. His work questions the authority of the archive, revealing how images can both preserve and distort collective understanding.
The exhibition’s title, drawn from an essay by V. S. Naipaul, encapsulates its central invitation: to face history directly, resisting the urge for simple explanations or moral certainties. In conversation with curator Trevor Mukholi and artist-researcher Andrea Stultiens, Griffin reflects on the intersections between art and ideology in storytelling, and on the collaborative work of History in Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), an archival publishing platform Andrea & Griffin co-founded, aiming to diversify and expand access to Uganda’s visual past.
Installation view of ‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’ at Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. Courtesy of NCAI.
Stephan Rheeder: Your exhibition title invites viewers to ‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’. How did you arrive at this phrase, and what emotional or intellectual challenge do you hope it poses to audiences?
Trevor Mukholi (TM): The title is a found object, in a way. It’s from an essay by South African scholar Ashraf Jamal. I came across it, and the phrase “Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking” didn’t give me a new idea; instead, it evoked an old feeling. It was the feeling I had in the archives, looking at these fragmented, contradictory images.
Of course, the idea isn’t his alone. It’s a reification of a critique that many thinkers have brought forth—pushing against the clean, grand narratives handed down to us. What I found so powerful in Jamal’s work, particularly in his commentary on V.S. Naipaul, was how he zeroed in on the gaze itself—the act of looking—and the power embedded in it. He gave poetic form to a critique that had been forming for a long time.
For me, the “mad eye of history” is not a single, focused lens. It’s a twitching, layered, chaotic gaze that sees everything at once: the missionary’s good intentions and the violence his presence enabled, the chief’s agency and his tragic compromises. This work, with all its splicing and layering, is an attempt to reconstruct that disorienting vision.
The real challenge lies in the second part: “without blinking.” Blinking, to me, implies simplification. You choose a side, you find your hero, your villain, your victim. You settle on a narrative that feels comfortable or righteous. In that blink, you miss the humanity of the other—and it’s in that mess that the truth resides. The task, then, is to resist the urge to blink: to hold contradictions together and sit with the discomfort that comes with it. If we keep sorting ourselves into simple camps, the old cycles of violence and dispossession continue. The real hope lies in reckoning with the whole, fractured system and imagining a future where a dignified life is possible for everyone caught in these histories.
Kaloli Omukulisitayo nga ati’bwa Omumbowa Senkole e Namugongo. (Kaloli, an Anglican convert being executed at Namugongo by Senkole the King’s Constable.) © Canon Griffin Rumanzi
Your process merges archival material, family photographs, and public documents into fractured digital collages. What guides your selection and layering of these elements, and how do you navigate the tension between historical fidelity and artistic reinterpretation?
Canon Griffin Rumanzi (CGR): My overarching aim is the construction of pictorial conversations. This can be achieved by combining these various picture forms to create coherence—or by deliberately undermining it to break sensory monotony, allowing more attention than is typically paid to billboards.
Historical fidelity is, in truth, an unattainable platitude. The past is always incomplete, leaving space for the present to exist. My work is, for the most part, a riddle— an overwhelming delivery with a cathartic exit through planned inconsistencies that remind every viewer these are assemblages, not attempts to mimic what really happened—or what will happen.
Ate nga babatwala okubokya. Lugalama ne Kakumba ne Serwanga. Abakristayo. (And then they take them for immolation. That is the Anglicans; Lugalama, Kakumba, and Serwanga.) © Canon Griffin Rumanzi
Uganda’s past is a central concern in your work, but Griffin’s approach and the work HIPUganda does also gesture toward broader questions of global connectivity, technology, and memory. In what ways do you see Uganda’s history as part of a broader conversation about postcolonial identity and digital historiography?
Andrea Stultiens (AS): There are three layers present in my work. Firstly, I question Ugandan historiography and aim to contribute to the availability of historical sources. Secondly, those sources become a case study for broader questions about global identity, memory, and power. Thirdly, I examine how artistic strategies can contribute to knowledge production—ways of doing and making that intervene in the generally accepted methods.
In 2012, HIPUganda was introduced to photographs from the Ham Mukasa Foundation, documenting one of the Buganda elite from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. His collection—comprising books, notes, and pictures—served as the starting point for many of Gryphon’s digital collages. These materials, part of our ongoing project Tudda Nyuma (“Let’s look back”), encourage speculation, relation, and interpretation. For us, that openness is essential. As long as imagination and critical thought are triggered, no truth claims are made, and every statement remains open to questioning, the work succeeds.
Installation view of ‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’ at Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. Courtesy of NCAI.
HIPUganda, the archive you co-founded, treats the past not as a fixed story but as something open to interpretation. How does this ethos inform your personal art practice, and what impact do you hope HIPUganda continues to have on public memory?
AS: I prefer to speak of interpretation rather than reinterpretation, to acknowledge that we all build on what already exists and inevitably alter it. I hope HIPUganda continues to show that what’s available is not all there is—that we can adopt an investigative attitude toward visual history, always questioning context, positionality, and provenance.
CGR: In the early days of HIPUganda, someone once told us, “Our history? The Zungus have it kept for us.” That comment revealed a painful gap between a people and their past—a past that was mainly documented by others. Many still assume someone, somewhere, has recorded everything. What Andrea and I try to show is that those records are partial, shaped by their creators’ intentions and limitations. By confronting that, we encourage a flexible mindset, one that constantly adjusts to new information. More people are beginning to position themselves differently within history, finding new ways to understand a complex present and to imagine a more informed, collective future.
Abakulistayo nga bwebasibwa mu nyinyo nga ensekese ze Nku. Nga bagenda okutibwa. (Anglican converts to be executed, tied up in reeds, like bundles of firewood.) © Canon Griffin Rumanzi
Several of your previous works, such as We Are All Slaves, suggest a profound examination of power structures. How do you see the visual archive functioning as both a tool of domination and resistance, especially within contemporary Uganda?
CGR: Digitally democratised archives—the easy-access kind—allow questioning and remixing. They allow us to reposition our life stories, address discrepancies, and envision new social orders shaped by connection and reciprocity. Everybody dominates relative to their role; there’s nothing to resist except gravity. Desirable possibilities increase, and soon things start looking up.
Munyagabyanjo nga bamusibye ku Muti mu Mbuga y…nga babulila ekibina ekyaja okwelolera abasibe. (Munyagabyajo and his brother Alfred Kidza bound to a tree in Mukajanga’s compound, the duo preach unto spectators.) © Canon Griffin Rumanzi
Given the disjointed, unresolved nature of history that your work embraces, how do you hope audiences carry this discomfort forward? Is there an ethical or imaginative work you’re inviting them to do after they leave the gallery?
AS: I hope audiences examine the presence or absence of historical photographs in their personal collections with fresh eyes, engaging with them critically and imaginatively. Connecting grand narratives to personal ones—while remaining oriented toward the future—is a powerful form of reflection.
CGR: Lives improve when our ways of relating to each other are built from as many valid points of reference as possible. The tragedy has already happened—we’ve ended up as neighbours sharing competing lifespans in a continuum none of us fully understand. So why not pay attention to yesterday’s pictures, to adjust how we appear in today’s, and to imagine tomorrow’s together?
‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’ is on view at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) through 2 November 2025. For visitor information and program updates, visit NCAI.
