A solo exhibition at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) tracing history through digital collage and archival intervention
Canon Griffin, Abaddu Working; We Are All Slaves, 2020. Digital photomontage with archival images and found photographs.
What does it mean to face history without blinking? For Canon Griffin Rumanzi, it means refusing neat stories and instead working with the splinters. His solo exhibition, ‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’, curated by Trevor Mukholi at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), builds a visual language from fragments that rarely sit comfortably together. Government seals, colonial papers, family portraits, anonymous snapshots, and recovered press images are cut, layered, and re-sutured into photomontages that feel at once intimate and civic.
The Practice of Attention
Rumanzi’s method is about attention, not spectacle. He treats archives as living material that can be reconfigured to expose what is missing or suppressed. Works like Abaddu Working; We Are All Slaves (2020) compress historical time into a single frame, forcing viewers to hold contradictions in view. The density is deliberate: Rumanzi invites us to move slowly, to notice how a bureaucratic stamp interrupts a domestic gesture or how a portrait resists context.
This approach extends through History in Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), the public archive he co-founded with artist and researcher Andrea Stultiens. HIPUganda digitises and republishes photographs from or about Uganda’s past, opening them to scrutiny and reinterpretation. The ethos of accessibility and contestation runs through the exhibition, where images circulate across works and audiences are asked to reckon with both presence and absence.
Looking Into the “Mad Eye”
The exhibition title sets the stakes clearly. To look into the “mad eye of history” is to accept history as chaotic, unresolved, and fragmented. Drawing on the ideas of writer Ashraf Jamal, it resists binaries such as hero and villain, victim and perpetrator. Rumanzi’s photomontages embody this refusal, positioning history as an ongoing negotiation.
Curator Trevor Mukholi amplifies this by pacing the works to encourage shifts between distance and proximity. From afar, compositions read as unified fields; up close, their layered construction becomes legible, seams and ruptures exposed. Typography, official insignia, and the grain of scanned paper interrupt pictorial space, reminding us that meaning is constructed and contested.
Uganda, Technology, and the World
Rumanzi situates Uganda’s past within global questions of technology and conflict. Digital collage becomes not just a tool but a metaphor for how information travels and authority attaches to images. By placing state symbols following private snapshots, he destabilises the line between public record and personal memory. This friction shapes how communities imagine themselves, which events gain visibility, and which lives are counted.
The exhibition also underscores Rumanzi’s engagement beyond gallery walls. His workshops and collaborations with institutions such as The Uganda Press Photo Award/FOTEA, Makerere University Library, and Uganda Christian University highlight a pedagogy of images. Projects like #PoliticianEyes (Let Me Help You Lead You) and Your Heart Ho! explore how photographs circulate in everyday politics, social media, and civic life.
A Broader Trajectory
Rumanzi (b. 1991, Uganda) has shown his work at Fotomuseum Antwerp, Afriart Gallery Kampala, the Stellenbosch Triennale, Format Festival, the World Bank Foundation in Washington, DC, Goethe-Zentrum Kampala, and the Uganda National Museum. He has also participated in Kampala Art Biennale, Addis Foto Fest, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, and Nyege Nyege Festival. His 2018 residency at 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust deepened his roots in Kampala’s scene, while his ongoing collaboration with Stultiens continues to anchor HIPUganda.
These experiences reinforce the exhibition’s global resonance: Uganda’s fractured histories are presented not in isolation but as part of broader debates on archives, technology, and power.
Why It Matters
Rumanzi’s refusal to blink is also a refusal to give up on understanding. His photomontages do not sanitise painful histories, nor do they sensationalise them. Instead, they insist on sustained, reparative attention. In a moment when history is often mobilised for political expediency, his work reclaims it as a space of complexity—where contradictions can be faced rather than flattened.
For NCAI, the exhibition affirms the institute’s role as a hub for East African contemporary art and research. Founded in 2020, NCAI preserves, exhibits, and narrates the stories that shape the region’s art scene. Hosting Rumanzi’s first major solo show in Nairobi underscores its mission to foster dialogue across archives, memory, and contemporary practice.
‘Looking into the Mad Eye of History Without Blinking’ is on view at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) from 11 September to 2 November 2025. Admission is free. Visit ncai254.com for details.
