1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London 2025: Martin Jakaila, Collin Sekajugo
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50 GOLBORNE is pleased to announce its participation in the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, presenting new works by Ugandan artist Collin Sekajugo (b.1980) and introducing Kenyan artist Martin Jakaila (b. 1988) for the first time to an international audience.
50 GOLBORNE is pleased to announce its participation in the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, presenting new works by Ugandan artist Collin Sekajugo (b.1980) and introducing Kenyan artist Martin Jakaila (b. 1988) for the first time to an international audience.
Both artists recently took part in the gallery’s first exhibition in Nairobi, “It Resonates”, a project exploring sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance through the work of nine African artists. Commissioned by TED Countdown (Climate Change) for its June summit in Nairobi, the exhibition was reinstalled for local audiences in September.
At 1-54, Martin Jakaila presents a selection from his powerful new body of work, which explores the motif of landscape painting through the vagaries of childhood memories.
The paintings reveal sophisticated compositions and a subtle use of color. With exaggerated or diminished, abstracted or detailed motifs, the artist plays with shifting viewpoints,subtly distorting the hilly landscape of Western Kenya near Lake Victoria, where he spent his early years. The visual recall of the hills seems subverted by the sentient body of the child moving through them, and by the train of thoughts that accompanied the experience, influenced by traditional local beliefs that the stones of the terrain have a sacred connection with the ancestors.
Collin Sekajugo, who gained international recognition with the Uganda Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (Special Mention), continues his exploration of the social fabric, and of the notions of identity and power, through mixed media works combining polypropylene, wax fabric, bark cloth, denim, and different techniques such as painting, collage, printing and stitching.
In his latest work shown at 1-54, the recurring motif of the net which captures figures seemingly caught in the trappings of privilege and power, highlighting what he sees as the tension of being constrained by the very systems that produce them.
50 GOLBORNE is delighted to present these two distinct East African voices at 1-54 London 2025.
