Henry Mzilli Majunga is a Ugandan-born painter, printmaker and writer. Born in 1971, he attended Makerere Art School in Kampala, Uganda, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Art and then a Postgraduate Diploma in Education. He believes his work is inspired by some of the great modernists of Uganda’s post-independence period. Majunga has been investigating intuitive manners of resurrecting African art. Through the art movement indigenous expressionism Magunja encourages artists to utilise any artistic media to express themes of independence and individualism. He is a firm believer in the value of networking among contemporary African artists in order to share their culture and create an interesting dialogue with the art being produced globally.
Magunja’s work references his immediate environment in order to create heroic narratives that promote human fortitude and empathy. His work combines various, seemingly unrelated things into a single frame. The work is set in intimate spaces where highly personal interactions take place while at the same time alluding to external associations. His Crowd Control: Six Degrees of Separation series, shown in 2016 addressed themes of love, friendship, contentment, and interconnectivity. Six Degrees of Separation revolves around the notion that all living things are six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
Magunja’s gathering of objects, spaces, and the existing associations with these objects mimics the processes of identity-making that he observes in his native Uganda. Individuals often rely on their outward appearance, their possessions, even their environments to communicate their own vision of themselves. At the same time, these very things are looked upon by others to identify those around them. Ultimately, through these information-packed autobiographical compositions, Magunja is interested in ‘awing’ and ‘pleasuring’ his audience through color and subject.
Magunja is a founding member of the East African Art Group Index Mashariki, which seeks to re-establish relevancy for art in the local community by promoting indigenous-expressionism. He is a co-founder of Kampala Arts Trust and the Online Visual arts Journal Start Journal of Arts and Culture. He is also a member of the Pan African Circle of Artists that links artists working for the integration of Africa through art.
He has been represented by Afriart Gallery at the Johannesburg Art Fair and the Cape Town Art Fair. He has exhibited at the Handle with Care exhibition in Dresden, Germany and at the Text Messages exhibition at David Young Gallery in Edinburg, Scotland. Magunja is a winner of the Royal Overseas League Art Scholarship 2003 and has exhibited in galleries in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, France, and the Netherlands. He is the first curator of the Kampala Art Biennale, 2014.
