Sanaa Gateja Ugandan , b. 1950

Biography
Sanaa Gateja
The artist works systematically with women of the communities  around his Kampala and countryside studios, which is an important part of his process which he wants to be sustainable in social and environmental terms. His concrete engagement with local craftsmanship, waste transformation and community cohesion makes his work politically engaged as well as an attempt to representative of  traditional East African values. 
His soft sculptures are composed of hundreds of paper beads that are stitched one by one onto bark cloth- a  traditional fabric that is made from the bark of an East African ficus tree-  composing lush tableaux that have a haptic quality. 
 
The beads are made and tinted by hand from paper that the  artist reclaims from newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, etc. . The information each bead carries, words and images, are literally crushed, although deformed letters emerge when one gets close enough to the work, evoking a  mysterious,  undecipherable language- or how the constant information we are submitted to finally creates an indifferent  ‘white noise’.
 
Yet the main narrative is constructed by the artist who masterfully manipulates the placement and juxtaposition of the beads, applying painting upon them in parts. The abstract or more recognisable motifs he creates are animated in an orchestrated movement, alternating solidity and  fluidity, vibration and calm to serve  the themes that interest him, would they be colonial taxonomy, vernacular architecture, or traditional and contemporary philosophies of nature.
 
The artist works systematically with women of the communities  around his Kampala and countryside studios, which is an important part of his process which he wants to be sustainable in social and environmental terms. His concrete engagement with local craftsmanship, waste transformation and community cohesion makes his work politically engaged as well as an attempt to representative of  traditional East African values. 
 
Gateja left Uganda’s civil war and lived afterwards in Kenya, then leaving again to Italy, and the UK -where he studied Fine Art and Design. He came back to Kampala only in the late 1990s.  His work is permanently on display at the National Museums in Uganda and Kenya. It was exhibited among other places in the Cairo International Biennial; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Biennale Gwangju, Korea; Mbari Institute, Washington DC; African Centre, London. 
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