Through a practice rooted in digital collage and archival intervention, Canon Griffin Rumanzi explores the turbulent, fragmented, and often contradictory nature of Uganda’s past and its continuing resonance in the present. His works splice together public records and private memories, challenging audiences to face history in its full complexity, without simplifying or averting their gaze.
The exhibition’s title describes its guiding principle: a commitment to regard history as it is, without hurrying for a narrative that contains it easily. This is an idea with a deep intellectual lineage, a challenge passed down through thinkers who refuse easy comforts. That perspective is powerfully articulated by the writer Ashraf Jamal, whose work provides a crucial instrument for historicizing our present moment. What does it mean to look into the “mad eye of history”? It means rejecting simple narratives of heroes and villains. It is an encouragement to see the whole splintered picture—chaotic and unresolved—and to reckon with it directly.
Griffin situates Uganda’s past within global questions of connectivity, technology, and conflict. His method, layering colonial documents, state symbols, family portraits, and everyday images, creates a visual grammar of fracture that refuses containment. It is a practice he extends through History in Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), a public archive he co-founded with artist and educator Andrea Stultiens, dedicated to making Uganda’s visual history accessible and contestable.
The exhibition invites audiences to sustained attention, insisting that we witness the contradictions of history without retreat. It calls us to look directly—without blinking—at the fractures that continue to shape how nations, communities, and individuals understand themselves.
​
Artist Biography​
Canon Griffin Rumanzi (b.1991, Uganda) is a visual artist whose practice interrogates archives, memory, and historical representation. Working with digital collage, photography, and research, he reconfigures images and documents to reveal how official histories conceal as much as they reveal. Griffin is also the co-founder of History in Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), a long-term project dedicated to digitizing, sharing, and reinterpreting Uganda’s visual past. His work has been exhibited regionally and internationally, contributing to vital conversations about how African histories are remembered, forgotten, and retold.
Rumanzi’s work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, with notable presentations at the Fotomuseum Antwerp (2017), Afriart Gallery Kampala (2018, 2020), the Stellenbosch Triennale (2020), Format Festival (2022), the World Bank Foundation in Washington DC (2022), Goethe-Zentrum Kampala (2019, 2023), and the Uganda National Museum (2023). He has also participated in major platforms such as the Kampala Art Biennale (2016), Addis Foto Fest (2014), the Noorderlicht Photo Festival (2015), and Nyege Nyege Festival (2022, 2023).
Residencies and collaborations have been central to his practice. In 2018, he was artist-in-residence at 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust, and he frequently collaborates with Dutch artist Andrea Stultiens on History in Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), a platform they co-founded in 2011. HIPUganda collects, digitizes, and republishes photographs from or about Uganda’s past, reframing archival material to expand public access and stimulate new conversations about memory, identity, and futures.
In addition to exhibiting, Rumanzi has facilitated workshops and public presentations with institutions such as The Uganda Press Photo Award/FOTEA, Makerere University Library, and Uganda Christian University, often focusing on the creative use of archives and visual storytelling. His projects, including #PoliticianEyes (Let Me Help You Lead You) and Your Heart Ho!, embody a socially engaged practice that reflects on politics, community, and the contradictions of contemporary life.