Abakan

Abakan

In the Northern Ugandan Lango language, Abakan translates to "broken or cracked pots, plastered over with earth." The immersive installation draws on this concept to frame women as custodians of repair, healing, and material memory. The work's concept of repair is closely connected to the artist's own family history. Emerging through research into the lasting effects of the political violence of 1971 and the Northern Ugandan War, during which much of her maternal family was killed, the work asks how indigenous knowledge of repair can become both a material and symbolic act of healing. Conceptualized in the Northern Ugandan village of Okwongo, the practice offers an African parallel to the globally celebrated Japanese art of Kintsugi. However, while Kintsugi is widely canonized, the Lango practice remains historically unnamed and marginalized within dominant art-historical discourses.

Rather than interpreting material fissures as technical defects, Abakan honors them as authentic results of traditional open-pit firing. By integrating these cracks into the life of the vessel, the artwork positions Lango pottery as a vital, gendered knowledge system passed from mother to daughter. Simultaneously, Abakan confronts the precarity surrounding these indigenous makers, whose skilled labour is routinely undervalued. By foregrounding the slow, collective production of wide-mouthed water pots, the work resists the erasure of indigenous knowledge and women's labour.

Abakan investigates how water can function simultaneously as a reflective surface, a projection screen, and an archive for knowledge systems. The first iteration of this work, shows 5 video projections cast onto the water contained within the individual pots.

5-channel video, looped, HD, stereo, bark cloth, 2026

The installation uses clay, banana leafs, water, blue pigments, shea butter and video projection

25 min

Collaborators: 

Clay Collectors & Pounders:

Apil, Nancy
Amonogi, Sarah
Acio, Ketty
Aceng, Miriam

Potters:

Akongo, Sofia
Acola, Catherine
Awili, Josephine
Akoro, Florence
Abua, Beatrice

Research Advisors:

Prof. William Otim Nape
Prof. Okaka Opio Dokotum
Mukumbi Allan 

Media Installation Technicians:

Lesiba Mabitsela
Evans Akanyijuka