Final Symposium: Mentorship Program for East African Curators

Jun 27, 2025

ICI Online

9:00-10:30 am EDT/
4:00-5:30 pm EAT

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Join ICI, Njabala Foundation, and AWARE on June 27th for a virtual public symposium featuring presentations by participants in the Mentorship Program for East African Curators. Over the past six months, the participants have been developing innovative curatorial and research projects with guidance from their mentors and input from their peers. This event marks the conclusion of the mentorship program, which has supported six emerging arts workers by creating a platform to develop their practice, gain resources, enhance research and discourse, and engage with established curators from East Africa and beyond. Offering opportunities to develop tools and actions to raise awareness about gender issues in the East African context, the program has uplifted a new generation of cultural workers sensitive to the place of women artists and augment the agency of female-identifying artists, curators, and educators in the region and globally.

This symposium offers an opportunity to hear directly from the participants as they share the ideas and questions shaping their projects and broader practices. The presentations reflect a range of approaches and perspectives, rooted in the specific contexts in which the curators are working across East Africa.

This program will take place on Zoom, and is open to the public to attend. To receive the Zoom link, RSVP here.

4:00pm: Welcome remarks from Martha Kazungu, Founding Director, Njabala Foundation

4:10pm: Turakella Editha Gyindo, Jumba Bovu Exhibitions
The project began as a personal inquiry into myths and taboos surrounding women in public space. Through research, reflection, and engagement with communities, It became a series of participatory interventions across Dar es Salaam’s unused, incomplete, abandoned buildings and public spaces locally called “Jumba Bovu.”

4:20pm: Maria Olivia Nakato, Katandika Butandisi
Katandinka Butandisi draws on the acting and storytelling practices of Hollywood, Nollywood, and Asian cinema, often using voiceovers or off-screen commentary to provide additional context and insight, as well as personal interpretation, commonly referred to as “VJing” (Video Jockeying).

4:30pm: Wairimũ Nduba, Where Are Those Songs?
Where Are Those Songs? is an ongoing project that seeks to attend to the ways that African women's sonic practices provide pathways towards crafting a curatorial methodology.

4:40-4:50pm: Short break

4:50 pm: Nicole Remus, Ink & Kin
Ink & Kin is a curatorial exploration of tattoos as a dialect of corpoliteracy—an embodied way
of speaking, remembering, and reframing how we see and are seen. Grounded in the relationship between twin artist sisters, Erinah Fridah Babirye and Maria Olivia Nakato, the project reflects on how tattoos embody memory and meaning across time and context, and how bodies become both archive and narrative.

5:00pm: Sarah Waiswa, Missing from the Frame: Kenyan Women and the Photographic Archive
Missing from the Frame: Kenyan Women and the Photographic Archive is a curatorial research project that seeks to uncover and celebrate the overlooked contributions of Kenyan women photographers from the post-independence era to the present.

5:10pm: Nafkot Gebeyehu, Building Sustainable Artist Residencies in Africa
Building Sustainable Artist Residencies in Africa explores ways to navigate funding structures to launch a residency program at Studio 11 Gallery, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

5:20-5:40 pm: Q&A

Presenters

Nafkot Gebeyehu

Nafkot Gebeyehu is a documentary photographer and journalist with a passion for storytelling.

Turakella Editha Gyindo

Turakella (Tura) is an art curator and multidisciplinary artist based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Maria Olivia Nakato

Maria Olivia Nakato is an emerging curator with Muumba Collective.

Wairimũ Nduba

Wairimũ Nduba is a Kenyan multidisciplinary creative whose practice is rooted and guided by African sonic principles which hold music to be a site of communal gathering, healing, joy, and beauty.

Nicole Remus

Nicole Remus (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary creative practitioner (self-taught Visual Artist, Curator/Scenographer, Graduate Architect, and Poet) from Jinja, Uganda.

Sarah Waiswa

Sarah Waiswa is a Ugandan-born, Kenya-based award winning documentary and portrait photographer with an interest in exploring the New African Identity on the continent.

About Njabala Foundation
The Njabala Foundation is a not-for-profit organization based in Uganda and founded in 2021 by Ugandan curator Martha Kazungu to facilitate visibility for women artists in Africa and its diaspora through exhibitions, research, mentorship, and community engagement. https://njabala.com/

About AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions
AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions is an NGO created in 2014 that works towards making women artists of the 18th to 21st centuries visible by producing and sharing free bilingual (French/English) content about their work on its website, organizing events and editing its own printed publications.
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/