In “LumiimaMawugwe,” the latest exhibition by the artist, musician, filmmaker, fashion designer, and poet Xenson, he responds to the experience of the pandemic by drawing on his own prescient earlier bodies of work: namely, his 2015 series “Barakoa” (Swahili for “mask”) and his 2016 “Afro Goth” fashion collection, in which face coverings featured prominently. The show’s title reflects the attempt to translate Covid-19 into Luganda and communicate its gravity to a population reluctant to listen. Within the exhibition, the coinage is used to point to the period leading up to last year’s presidential elections, when the pandemic was used as an excuse to persecute political opponents.
Throughout his self-titled three-roomed gallery, Xenson has composed a constellation of paintings, video, and sculptural installation that reflect on confinement and survival in death-haunted times. Brightly colored portraits of figures in various face coverings square off against more-brooding wall-mounted works that fasten actual black rubber masks onto bark-cloth canvas as a kind of surface treatment. The video installation Kaduukulu (Holding Cell, 2021) projects the lyrics to the song “Bugulumu,” (Hurdles), which uses language—idioms, sayings, proverbs—to offer solace, while also hinting at a government that has overstayed its welcome.
At the entrance to the space, the installation Omukulu wakwogerako eri eggwanga (The chief addresses the nation, 2021), erects a wooden throne against a bark-cloth backdrop, which has been suspended from the two-storied facade. Xenson animated this setup with a performance that borrows a MOKO mask from the artist’s Afro Goth collection, which was inspired by Kibuuka Omumbale, the Baganda god of war, who wages battles in space, having taken flight five hundred years before Superman. Xenson now styles the mask as a talisman, a powerful spiritual object that acts as a charm to ward off evil (or at least, infection).
