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LABOR, MATERIAL, AND SPACE IN VIOLA NIMUHAMYA’S SCULPTURAL WORLD
Folding, threading, looping. Viola Nimuhamya’s sculptural practice begins with these gestures. She first learned basket-weaving as a child, from the women in her community in Uganda, and the intelligence of these techniques remains central to her evolving art practice today. In one of our early conversations, Nimuhamya explains that her fascination lies in taking these inherited techniques and opening them outward, allowing them to be “broken, reconfigured, and multiplied.” Starting from modest circular shapes, Nimuhamya slowly constructs larger constellations. At times they bloom into floral forms, as in The Little Things, her contribution to the group exhibition I Could Only See the Back of It at Bergen Kunsthall (2025). At other times, as in her solo exhibition at Southnord in Stockholm, they grow larger like vines or alien species, hanging breathlessly in space, stretching along walls or coiling into corners. Each unit, slight in scale, through repetition and aggregation transforms into structures that command presence. The work thus stages a dialogue between intimacy and site-specificity, showing how each gesture, repeated and accumulated, can create forms that alter how we might engage with a space.
Born and raised in Uganda, Nimuhamya studied Art and Industrial Design at Kyambogo University in Kampala, before developing a multidisciplinary practice across drawing, painting, and collage. In 2022, she was invited to exhibit and conduct research at the Njabala Foundation in Kampala. At the time of writing this essay, she has lived and studied in Norway for two years, completing her MA in Fine Art at the Art Academy, Department of Contemporary Art, at the University of Bergen. Her practice has, in recent years, increasingly gravitated toward sculpture, with particular attention to textiles sourced from donation networks and secondhand markets. As she describes intently, each fabric carries its own biography: faded colors, worn textures, frayed seams. The garments enter her studio as material archives, fragments of global circuits of consumption and disposal. Through her interventions, Nimuhamya preserves these embedded histories while generating radical formal and spatial possibilities. In so doing, the resulting works operate across multiple registers, speaking to Norway where the materials are sourced, to Uganda where the techniques were learned, and most importantly, to the artist herself and her evolving negotiation of these entangled geographies.
Contemporary art has witnessed a pronounced turn toward acknowledging the importance of textiles and soft sculpture, a shift both overdue and fraught with complexity. This visibility highlights both the vitality and capacity for reinvention inherent in textiles and the ongoing art historical work needed to foreground artists and practices long excluded from the canon. But with such prominence of course, comes the risk of oversaturation. Within this charged landscape, I find Nimuhamya’s practice particularly compelling. She re-tools textile methods to meet her own needs and desires, attending closely to the material itself. However, while honoring the histories inscribed in each fabric's texture, she refuses their overdetermination of the work's meaning. Material memory becomes the substrate, not the conclusion, from which expansive sculptural possibilities emerge.
In so doing, Nimuhamya’s burgeoning practice enters into generative dialogue with artists who have explored modularity and accumulation through fiber. Sheila Hicks’ monumental scale, Nnenna Okore’s biomorphic constructions, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke’s immersive environments, and Samuel Nnorom’s constellatory forms offer precedents of material and spatial exploration that Nimuhamya thoughtfully engages. Her own references extend to Olga de Amaral and Marianne Kemp, and in our conversations, it is clear that she holds deep reverence for all those who have come before her. All the while continuously probing how her own work both draws from and departs from these legacies.
This genealogy also naturally connects Nimuhamya’s work to feminist and craft histories. Domestic and communal labor, often excluded from art historical discourse and frequently carried out by women, is the primary source of inspiration for Nimuhamya. By adapting techniques of everyday maintenance and care into sustained sculptural processes, Nimuhamya situates her practice in broader conversations about material histories, gendered labor, and the politics of visibility. Yet she complicates any simple recuperative narrative. As she emphasizes, repetitive labor contains multiple valences: it can be oppressive or meditative, isolating or community-building, depending of course on the conditions of its undertaking. This nuanced understanding manifests formally and conceptually in her sculptures. “Each part comes together in its own time," she observes, “one after the other, one at a time."
If Nimuhamya’s practice invites broad reflections on labor, material, and art history, its true force resides most clearly in the sculptures themselves, as presented in her solo exhibition at Southnord in Stockholm. Here, circular units extend, coil, and accumulate without constraint, responding to architecture and light in ways that only a site-specific installation allows, which is where Nimuhamya sees her work developing further. The installation reveals both the conceptual rigor undergirding her practice and the specificity of sustained, deliberate labor. Through these familiar forms, her sculptures come to inhabit and reconfigure the spaces they occupy.
It will indeed be fascinating to see how Nimuhamya’s sculptural language continues to evolve. One at a Time demonstrates the particular power of encountering her work within a dedicated space, fully realized, where the full scope of her sculptural logic can unfold without compromise. But these installations also hint at many other forms. How might her practice shift based on where her studio is located? How will her sculptures continue to grow in different contexts? What is certain is that Nimuhamya’s trajectory promises a sustained engagement with the entanglement of labor, material, and space, probing audiences to witness the intimacy of her formal gestures and the far reaches of her sculptural world.