I’ll Be Your Mirror: Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Science Fiction of Truth

Abstract

Euro-modern colonisation produced many truths, which, despite having been recognised as false information, continue to shape the social order of today. Artist Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s lifelong quest was to build a subjective artistic relationship with the physical traces of colonial disinformation, which still resonate in Ugandan art education. But sometimes it is impossible to make clean separations. The post-conceptual practice of the British–Ugandan artist Wolukau-Wanambwa challenges and subverts the experience of complex contemporary social realities which were triggered by colonialism. Her artistic stress test exposes the instability of facts and the liquid ambiguity of archived information. This article explores the artist’s conscious and radical act of subjective entanglement with her research. The visual and textual analysis of her works’ conceptual layering unlocks politically charged archival truths to release new fictions for the future.

Keywords:

• post-conceptual art
• archival turn
• colonial disinformation
• Uganda
• Black subjectivity
• science fiction