Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s work as a researcher, photographer, and author of texts and video installations, was well-recognised worldwide before her death at the age of 46 on January 3, 2023. Her family said that the cause was a degenerative illness that she had been battling for years.
Born in 1976 in Glasgow, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa studied literature at Cambridge and art at University College London. She was the director of research at Nagenda International Academy of Art & Design in Namulanda, Uganda, from 2014 to 2016. She was a PhD student at Norway’s University of Bergen. Her work has been shown at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, SAVVY Contemporary and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the Serpentine Galleries in London, and the Kampala Contemporary Art Festival in Uganda, among others.
Having worked in London for a large part of her career, Wolukau-Wanambwa was one of the artists who, in recent years, have undertaken research that involves delving deep into archives and elucidating histories that had been made invisible, whether because documentation has been lost or because those in power chose not to archive them.
Wolukau-Wanambwa’s work across diverse mediums analyzed how European colonialism continues to impact African countries today, especially Uganda, which was her home for many years. Her work brought her to some of the world’s top recurring art shows, including the 2022 edition of Documenta, where she participated as a member of the group Another Roadmap Art Collective.
Her widely seen works were moving-image pieces that featured overlays of text on imagery related to colonialism in Africa. Promised Lands (2015), which featured in the 2018 Berlin Biennale, contains a long take of a sunset with words like “NO THEATRE” periodically superimposed on it. On its audio is the sound of Wolukau-Wanambwa and her uncle Patrick, as well as spoken text by Theodor Hertzka, an Austrian economist who, during the 19th century, attempted to establish a utopian settlement for Europeans in East Africa.
Her other works focused on the empty graves of Polish people who emigrated to the Uganda Protectorate; “La Croisière Noire,” a 1924–25 initiative led by the founder of automotive company Citroën that involved driving off-road vehicles across French colonies in Africa, from Algeria to Madagascar; and the life and work of Amy Ashwood Garvey, a Jamaican activist who became involved in the Pan-Africanist movement.
Her work ‘Of Houses and Death’ began as an investigation into the changing relationship between the land, the building and the body in contemporary Uganda, and then evolved into a study of representations of late colonialism.
Wolukau-Wanambwa established a practice of narrating fresh stories across her work.
“I think storytelling is essential in all sorts of contexts,” she said in the A.i.A. interview. “We live by stories, and the ways we narrativize our experience of the world matter.”
Wolukau-Wanambwa’s work was differentiated by her passion for the material she took up and profound confidence in the potential of education, particularly in Africa.
“I don’t actually describe myself as a filmmaker—I’m someone who does things with video from time to time. I’m always relearning editing software from scratch because it’s changed so much since the last time I used it. Still, I do often find that a lot of the conceptual questions I’m asking bring me back to film and video—issues of framing, representation, and manipulation of the image. I have recurring fantasies of making a proper narrative feature film, but somehow, the ideas always decompose en route. Time and again, I find myself coming to the conclusion that the medium is wrong for the story, so then I start to fiddle with the fragments.”
