Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Myriam Ben Salah
American, French, Tunisian; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Renaissance Society
42%
Wakaliga Uganda: If Uganda Was America. 2025. Exhibition
This exhibition is a conceptual artwork whose medium is the Kampalan mega-low-budget action film studio Wakaliga Uganda and whose artist is the show's curator, Myriam Ben Salah. Well, every art exhibition is a conceptual artwork, but it's either improper or not worthwhile to treat most shows as such. (The Met's European picture galleries aren't "about" how their mode of display enframes the work and makes it legible in particular ways; Harald Szeemann's exhibitions were.) I say it's worth judging If Uganda Was America as a unified aesthetic whole whose author is the curator not simply because the contemporary-art-show context is so determinative of what we're capable of seeing in the work, but because this determinativeness seems to have been thematized by the show's particular mode of display. An orange carpet has been laid out, on top of which has been erected a system of wood-framed rooms — some walled by fabric, some not — in which the films are either projected or played on screens. It's not this display apparatus itself that makes us register the films' fractured narratives, uncouth camerawork, and harsh digital images as artistically (rather than cinematically) significant; it's the institutional setting of the Renaissance Society alone that transforms Wakaliga Uganda's work into Contemporary Art. But within the exhibition's diegesis, the former comes to stand in for the latter — the show as a whole, from the exposed wood to the sleek colorways to the coy soundbleed between the videos, is almost like a representation or materialization of the power which a fancy American art gallery has to legitimate and aestheticize the filmic messings-around of poor thirdworlders. Problem is, the show is evasive on this very important (conceptual) point: it accomplishes the aesthetic overhaul of Wakaliga Uganda's work without owning up to it, as it should have (i.e. the show is presented as the filmmakers' doing, not Ben Salah's). To do so might have been icky — it might have put on display how useless and imperious Contemporary Art really is — but it would have also imbued the exhibition with some self-recognition and self-criticality about what it's really up to, formally. (2025)