The work on show is clearly the artist’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. The artist is among the few that have veered away from their usual themes in their works to tackle an immediate issue. He relays in the catalogue under the exhibition brief that when he was going through his sketch book at the beginning of the pandemic, he found sketches of figures wearing masks which he couldn’t remember where the inspiration came from.
There is no day that I will stand and pretend that I wove the mats or the bags, I mean, that would be a blatant lie but in terms of taking these pieces as additive spices to tell a new story that involves their work, yes, that makes me the artist.
Remmy’s short coming however lies in his inability to zero down on a particular subject or themes that he could dance around to make a whole. He wobbles around multiple ideas that he fails to link into one.
There is a multitude of ways on how to make entry into Mlengeya’s world. We could start with the women in the work, young and beautiful, very reflective of the artist’s locality, Uganda for having one of the youngest populations and East Africa for having some of the most good-looking ladies on the continent.
So I think it’s very right for artists to engage in politics in their work just like they deal with other issues in their society, it’s still their mandate. At the end of the day, politics affects everyone, if there is a rise in sugar prices, I don’t know if artists don’t take tea or don’t use sugar. If there is insecurity in the country, the artists won’t even create, so we have to talk about these issues so that there is a change.