YAO

YAO is an immersive, multi-channel video installation that explores topics like ancestry, womanhood, resilience, and community.
Rooted in autobiographical research, YAO is the first offering in a body of work that traces the artist’s biracial heritage through the migratory paths of her Ugandan grandfather and her German grandmother.
The installation is an intimate meditation on healing, intergenerational memory, and cultural resilience, articulated through the story of the Northern Ugandan Shea Tree and the ritual of making Shea butter.
Set in the village of Otuke in Northern Uganda, YAO honours the Shea tree not only as a holy symbol in Lango culture, but also as a living witness to a land scarred by several wars and political conflicts that took place in the region.
In this context, the act of creating Shea butter becomes a ritual of resistance and an act of survival that is passed on from mother to daughter. The artist weaves her voice into this collective memory, situating herself within a community she was once geographically distant from. In doing so, she negotiates complex questions of belonging by evoking embodied memory.

YAO was initially conceptualised as a three-channel piece and has since evolved into a site-responsive installation. The installation incorporates bark cloth, a traditional Ugandan textile made from the bark of the Mutuba tree, linking the materiality of the work to its theme and context and rooting it in locality.

3-channel video, looped, HD, stereo, bark cloth, 2024

8:40 min