Afriart Gallery presents Undone by artists Charlene Komuntale and Sarah Waiswa, a powerful meditation on the layered negotiations of womanhood in the face of cultural, historical and systemic constraints. Their practices, distinct yet in deep dialogue, offer slow, deliberate responses to entrenched ideologies —responses that unravel the myths, aesthetics and expectations that govern the female body.
Together, the artists destabilise the viewer’s gaze, not to present solutions, but to invite viewers into a space where the personal is rendered political, and where transformation begins not with answers, but with the audacity to ask different questions. Undone reframes the female subject not as a symbol to be decoded, but as a site of multiplicity—unfixed, intimate and wholly sovereign.
Komuntale’s work centers the Black female figure at the threshold of transformation. Through the symbolic act of loosening corsets—objects historically designed to shape, constrict, and idealise—she reveals not only the physical body but the unseen systems that bind it. Beading, embroidery and installation extend the metaphor, drawing attention to the cultural scripts sewn into our understanding of beauty and value. Her work resists tidy conclusions; instead, it makes space for uncertainty, asking who has authored our ideals, and what it might mean to let them go.
Waiswa, in turn, constructs images that interrupt societal narratives around fulfillment and femininity. Her series, titled Wild Fires, gently confronts the taboo of chosen childlessness in contemporary Kenya, layering portraits with collage elements—archival fragments, magazine clippings—that speak to the myths women inherit and the silence they often endure. Her visual language is one of quiet defiance: not a spectacle of resistance, but a sustained act of reclamation. In her hands, the female subject is never simplified, never fully exposed, and never passive.
Undone opened on the 26th of July and will run until the 6th of September 2025 at Afriart Gallery, Kampala.
