Money and cows can’t buy love

Valentine’s Day approaches and love is in the air… but so too is its destruction by the love of money.

Ugandan artist Joshua Ipoot has devoted his latest exhibition to the devastating effect on relationships of the cultural imperative of bride price. His model is his own community, the Karimojong.

Ipoot has taken over the Afriart gallery — more formally the Centre for Contemporary Art in Uganda — in Kampala’s Kamwokya area, to show a range of paintings developed during his post graduate studies in the UK.

Both his dissertation and painting at the Newcastle University School of Art and Cultures focused on the impact of bride price.

In the process both Ipoot’s technique and palette have changed, from the rich impasto we are used to seeing to a thinner, translucent quality and a range of pinks, lemons and pale blues encouraged, he says, by the “chilly, damp and grey” surroundings of the northeast of England.

I KNOW EXACTLY HOW IT FEELS

I am from the northwest, but I know exactly how he feels, poor man.

Now he is back in the heat and dust of Uganda I find myself hoping that his technique will change back again because, while admiring the skill of his recent work, I feel it lacks some of the power of his previous paintings.

In fact, the 15 pictures in this show constitute a polite, if not diffident, suggestion rather than a scream.

Nonetheless, these are the works of an artist with something to say who has chosen Surrealism as the lexicon to express his quiet despair at the effect of wealth — whether hard currency or in cattle — on relationships of the pastoralists.

His vocabulary includes eggs to represent fertility and their shells to show emptiness, while flowers (notably roses with their heady sexual symbolism) stand for love, with cracks across the canvas indicating love destroyed.

Ipoot’s cheerful palette offsets this mood by injecting a welcome hint of optimism.

These are large paintings, oil on canvas, each around 5ft square (1.5 sq metres).

Ipoot’s roses appear most dramatically in the three sensual paintings of his series Wealth and Love.

No 1 shows a pink rose, an eye at its centre with the curved petals forming lips… a face, then, of a young bride hoping for love, a wish already being destroyed, with symbolic cracks running across the flower and tight buds that could be taken for eggs representing the fertility not to be.

One detached petal is stained in a way that suggests the classical Greek mask of tragedy.

The reason for this heartache, we have to assume from the title, is her intended’s failure to stump up the bride price that would have secured a wedding.

No 2 is another pink rose, its portrayal more enigmatic as it appears to be slowly throttled by surrounding white petals. Are these the symbols of a lingering death caused by the failure to consummate love?

And then in No 3 the rose, both face and vulva, is mainly an ominous blue, only its inner petals a flash of red. The flower is riven with cracks and punctures and it seems that love here is already beyond hope.

Pastel shades notwithstanding, these are not happy or optimistic paintings, but they do possess a certain elegance and would earn their place on a wall.
Perhaps the problems Ipoot describes can be solved, although here is a painter who points out the hurdles without showing us how to leap over them — unless we assume the solution is to enact the opposite of whatever brought the community to this pass.

In this case that would suggest dismantling the system of bride price and its trail of families bankrupted by love.

PROVOKING THOUGHT

But to replace it with what? On this the exhibition is silent… a problem perhaps for others to solve.

Ipoot himself is quite honest about it. He writes in the catalogue accompanying the show: “I document happenings in the community not to prescribe a solution but rather to comment on it in order to provoke thought and equally to highlight, educate, inform, sensitise and thus to create awareness.”

Recently, the distinctive red Afriart house has hosted shows by such well known artists as the curator of this exhibition, Daudi Karungi, plus Paul Ndeema, Jjuuko Hoods and Jude Katete.

It is good to see that Karungi is continuing his practice of challenging convention, which — along with an exploration of oneself as a metaphor for society at large — is, I think one of the main reasons we value the arts.

This article was first published in the East African