BIOGRAPHY
Remmy Sserwadda a Ugandan artist based in Kampala born and breed self tough artist , i work with oils on canvas as a medium and now inducted sculptures to my artistic repertoire paying homage to one of the humongous yet undertoned brain drives, food, it’s culture, norms and momentous values to society, presentation in eating place and elsewhere, technologies both traditional and modern, among others .
Food with its big open arms welcomes all commentaries both heinous and sublime but still dons on a robust cultural identity borrowing this trait among others i use food cuisines as a metaphor to interpret, commentate on the whilst food agendas , politics , religion, culture ,traditions,society,and retrospectively document indigenous traditional and cultural of its preparation, recipes and methodologies of preparation of food especially the foods I grew up eating.
African cuisine/Ugandan cuisines taking replacement of skin anatomy in my work, background application and sculptures is a recipe I use to convoy , conceptualize societal and cultural narratives and their creeds. The cuisines have been trivialised and converted to unconventional knowledge keeps by the rest of the world and us a society yet when this knowledge is unearthed our societies would be better places
It’s not lost to me that one of the robust identies still intact to us as a society are food cultures, depleted to a larger measure is fashion (African /Ugandan dress code) language, life style , religion among others I creed with profuse , profound protection and documentation of our food culture we can salvage what identity is still left to us ; here in lies my role as an artist to play the custodian roles with my craft to serve this and the next generation by breathing a new life in documentation of the fore mentioned values .
According to a profound research by the world Food travel association it approximates that vast visitors spend about 25% of their budget on food and beverages on their respective travels , it’s a little bonkus that this lucrative potential is not taken to a grim note by my society what cringes even more is that even when they come to us, we pride in treating them with pastas , pizzas Hamburgs, KFC among others that are even best prepared in Europe and their Nativities or home land ; I had an art connoisseur check in at my studio astonished by the peers sporadically treating him to local delicacies like sukumaweki which he had been craving for ever since his first taste of it ,not KFC that he’s grown up eating .international conferences are not any different there is no seat for African delicacies and delights on their tables however much some of them have been held in Africa like the recent G7and Nam conferences in munyonyo in Kampala which we could have used as gimmicks to promote our very own.
Have we pushed our curriculums in our culinary schools To predominantly turt African cuisines , not to just certify chef’s basses off of aesthetic knowledge and acknowledgement of western foods but rather eclectic of African cuisines, fast forward they take up employment in major hotels and restaurants, it goes without saying that the anonymous view or claim “there is no seat at global tables for African/Ugandan cuisines” is quite true but inflammatory
CV
2019 group exhibition dubbed surfaces
2020 group exhibition dubbed look one
2021 won the slot for solo exhibition by upcoming artsits at xenson art space dubbed friend request and exhibited that year
2022 group exhibition at akka project dubbed kampala contemporary in dubai
2022 group exhibition at akka project dubbed african identities
STATEMENT
I creed with my hairly stick, paints , canvas, wires, Fabrice ,glues among other materials the moral approach is not to fig leaf these realities but question and remedy them .
