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Installation view, Jessica Karuhanga, Through a Brass Channel, 2017 and Body and Soul, 2019 in Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys, Museum London, 21 November 2024–11 May 2025. Photographer: Angela Antonopoulos
Jessica Karuhanga
Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys

Jessica Karuhanga

Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist of British-Ugandan heritage who addresses politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, sculpture, writing, drawing, and performance. Karuhanga’s practice explores self-articulation, beauty, illness, isolation, and grief through intuitive approaches to drawing and performative movement, centring Black subjectivity and embodiment.

A young Black woman with short curly hair sits with her shoulders hunched on the floor.
Portrait of Jessica Karuhanga. Photo: Gillian Mapp

I’m not actually trying to control the audience, my art comes from a place of wanting to be generous or of giving an offering.

A view of four copper pipes balanced on brass bangles and masonry stones with a stancheon around the installation.

Fig 1. Installation view, Jessica Karuhanga, Through a Brass Channel, 2017

An installation view of two artworks, one is a film projection on the wall and the other has three copper pipes balanced on brass bangles and masonry stones on the floor.

Fig 2. Installation view, Jessica Karuhanga, Through a Brass Channel, 2017 and Body and Soul, 2019

Art as Experience

The following text is an excerpt from With Opened Mouths: The Podcast. It has been edited for content and clarity. 

Qanita: I would like to start by talking about your personal journey towards art as a practice. What kind of child were you?

Jessica: I was a very introverted and very imaginative child. My earliest memories were playing with my siblings at my grandmother’s house. She lives in the country, surrounded by woods and forest. I’d often invent games, or build forts, and be running around from dawn until dusk. I also was an avid, avid reader. I would read a lot of books, I’d read a book a day and fly through them. I spent a lot of time going to second-hand bookshops with my parents, and I would also draw a lot. So I had notepads and sketchbooks. My grandmother would put her Royal Doultons on the table. Those dolls are, they’re endearing but kind of horrendous, and I would copy them exactly.

I grew up in a multiracial family. I myself am biracial, so I feel all of those layers come into play. I was never interested in being a representation for anyone else, I just knew that there are multiple points of contact where I could resonate with other folks. Whether it would be in terms of being Black and disabled, or living with chronic illness, those different points of relation.

Qanita: How does your work explore the collective concerns of Black subjectivity such as rage and grief, desire and longing, specifically in the context of Black embodiment.

Jessica:  I grew up in a post-industrial town in Sarnia, southwestern Ontario. I think, to this day, Black families only maybe make up 1% of the population. It also has one of the highest air pollution rates in North America, because our oil is produced there. So, that geographic context was significant in terms of how alienated I felt growing up. Representation really mattered a lot to me as a young kid, whether it was listening to a certain kind of music on the radio station or watching 106 & Park on BET. I grew up listening to disco records with my parents, African music, and R&B, and I was really into neo soul as a young kid. I was way too young to understand the depth of the failings of neo soul, or the blues. But still I was piecing through it. And then I had that desire for representation.

Qanita: Could you talk about your journey from more traditional mediums to what we see in your practice today?

Jessica: I believe that learning traditional forms is very important. From analogue photography to working with plaster or welding, or woodworking and things like that. And I still love those activities. The journey away from those mediums is an almost parallel journey to the representation question. I think there is a point, when I was in art school, where I realised that I want to learn a certain skillset and then I can break these roles or question those parameters. And I became very interested in postmodern dance, artists like Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer or Ana Halprin. I was interested in sound artists where they’re kind of breaking down sound in abstract ways. I became interested in the everyday. Things that felt like an extension of some of these Dadaist notions. And I had thought about that deeply. I thought, “What do pedestrian movements mean to me as a first-gen diasporic person?” I remember something clicking when I realized that anything could be material.

Qanita: How do your personal geographies shape your artistic practice?

Jessica: Growing up, it was very important to me to know where I’m from. When I think about my mom, her family’s from an area in Essex, in the UK, that’s an industrial seaport area. So it’s interesting that, as a young child, she immigrated to Canada and then met my dad, and they ended up in Sarnia. That’s an interesting parallel. And then my dad grew up in rural, western Uganda, and had a village life. Growing up, my parents were always making sure that I knew where I was from. In our family home, we have batiks, and masks, and drums, and sculptures, and all those things all over our house.

My dad would read us poetry by Okot p’Bitek in our native tongue, our tribe’s language. And so I was always connected that way. And my family would also give us storybooks on African culture. So I grew up having storybooks that were written in Swahili.

Qanita: What is the role of sound in your work?

Jessica: For me art is always an experience, physiologically and cognitively. And I feel forms of abstraction that really move me, like free jazz or hip-hop, that moved me a particular way, inform and influence how I think about my work. Every kind of music now seems to be used in different forms of sampling. But I also think about music metaphorically, Could I pull from different threads of sound? It’s almost like cooking. What happens when I mix these sounds together?

I think about sound a lot in terms of communication. There’s a traditional form of poetry in Uganda that is a call-and-response type of poetry, it’s a form of storytelling. My dad would teach it to us growing up. It was really cute. I say this part and you say that part, and now we share these parts. It became an art form, but also a form of communication in coded kind of ways that is rhythmic. I think, I think about that a lot. I think about the ways that smell and sound are two things that activate memories in a very haptic, intense way that can translate, transmute, transplant me to another space and time.

Full Image Credits 

Fig 1. Installation view, Jessica Karuhanga, Through a Brass Channel, 2017, copper pipes, brass bangles, masonry stones in Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys, Museum London, 21 November 2024–11 May 2025. Image © Alex Walker
Fig 2. Installation view, Jessica Karuhanga, Through a Brass Channel, 2017, copper pipes, brass bangles, masonry stones and Body and Soul, 2019, Single-channel video with sound, 02:06 minutes. Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery purchase, 2023 in Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys, Museum London, 21 November 2024–11 May 2025. Image © Alex Walker
Footnotes
Image Credits