Nsubuga Ibrahim
Is one of the artists in the exhibition ‘Eroticism and Intimacy: Faces, Places, and Paths’. It seeks to confront the gap in the discourse on African women on the historic worldwide celebration. Co-curated by Violet Nantume, Peter Genza, and Serubiri Moses, the show opens on 8th March in Kampala, comprising 20 artists from 5 countries, and explores the question of intimacy and erotic desire. Further, the exhibition proposes that African women can be emancipated, not only on world stages, but in sexual relations and intimate encounters. Body Pedagogy, a workshop staged during the exhibition, will explore these questions via theory.
About:
Born 22nd February 1986 in Mengo Kampala, Nsubuga Ibrahim, known as Ibrah, is a Ugandan artist. He is a descendant of a bark cloth maker and son to a traditional mat maker. He is a painter, author, poet, music chart host, art collector, composer, machine illustrator and graphic designer. At age eight, he was one of four young visual artists chosen to make Sunday school paintings at Namirembe cathedral because of his remarkable abilities. He started professional painting eight years later at age sixteen.
As a child, Ibrahim was shy and quite reserved. He escaped into the world of his dreams. Since childhood, his life revolved around art. He was even slapped by his nursery tutor for drawing with a dark crayon in a book! Ibrahim had an astonishing talent for drawing portraits, and he was interested in creating stories out of dreams to make fun of the real life and entertain other people’s imaginations. Before Ibrahim joined the School of Fine Art at Kyambogo University, he was a self-taught artist.
After catching typhoid fever in 2006 the artist felt like ‘To lose a life, he rather painted’. Only inspired by a few, his farther an engineer, Pablo Luiz Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh ,Frank.O.salisbury and Claude Monet, he adopted a style he calls fantasism. In 2006,Ibrahim exhibited his first academic oil paintings at the Makerere University art gallery, Michelangelo School of Creative Arts and Nommo gallery. He has also received honorable mention in 2009 in a young artist competition at Tulifanya gallery. After 2010, he became concerned with painting ideas and stories, he dreamed of “painting in space”.