Exhibition Mutualities at Royal Academy of Arts

In Luganda, the widest spoken minority language in Uganda, the word for photograph is ebifananyi. The term means ‘likenesses’, and can relate to drawings and paintings as well as to photographs. Ebifananyi are things that look like something else.

Photographer/researcher Andrea Stultiens embarked on a long-term research project about this particular conceptualisation of photographs, that seems so unfamiliar from a Western perspective. Working with collections of photographs in Uganda, Stultiens focused on the capacity of photographs as ‘encounters’, in the words of theorist Ariella Azoulay: ” the site where a camera, a camera operator and a photographed reality meet”, and where meaning is created in interaction with the audience watching the images.

Through a series of exhibitions in Uganda and Europe, and eight publications co-published by Paradox and History in Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), Stultiens investigated the differences between ebifananyi/photographs and the historical and cultural context of their creation and use. Through ‘correspondence’, a term borrowed from anthropologist Tim Ingold, different actors – photographs, image makers and audience – embarked on a shared path and engaged with each other’s positions.

The publications each activate a specific Ugandan photo collection through this process of dialogue and sharing of photographs, films and other likenesses. The complete series Ebifananyi I-VIII is for sale through YdocFoundation.

The exhibition Mutualities in the gallery of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague marks the occasion of Stultiens’ PhDArts dissertation on Ebifananyi and its relation to her method of research. In line with Stultiens’ hybrid practice, her defence will take place in two public moments: within the visual arts context of the exhibition at KABK and within the academic context of the University of Leiden.