Violet Nantume

Violet Nantume is a curator and director at UNDER GROUND, a gallery and contemporary art space in Kampala, Uganda. She has worked as cultural producer for eight years and has had collaborations in Eastern Africa, Ghana, South Africa, and Germany.

She has curated exhibitions including Close at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, and Indulgence at Goethe-Institut in Nairobi (both 2018); Being Her(e), Luanda (2017); Zikunta: Gale of Human, a solo show by Wasswa August Donald (2016); and Heart of Darkness; a solo show by Christian Tundula, Cast a Light on Prejudice; a photography solo by Papa Shabani, and Together We Can, an installation by Hellen Nabukenya at UNDER GROUND (2015). She curated Eroticism and Intimacy: Faces, Places and Paths in Kampala and at the 2016 FNB Art Joburg art fair in Johannesburg, South Africa. Nantume organized the first ever major art auction in Uganda in 2015. She chaired the curatorial committee of the Kampala Contemporary Art Festival in 2014.

She is currently working on a group exhibition That Those Beings Be Not Being at alpha nova & galerie futura in Berlin. The exhibition explores relation as »knowledge in motion«; a form of errant knowledge, with capacity to birth new and unexpected forms, abandoning the solid grounds of defined categories, such as the Nation, the Self, and the other. The exhibitions engages artists from Ghana and Uganda. Violet Natume is a lead researcher for an exhibition project Nnaggenda 2020 with Uganda’s living modern artist Prof. Nnaggenda X. Francis. The research takes off in Kampala, Nairobi, and Munich; three pivotal places Prof. Nnaggenda studied and practiced. The project is curated with Dr. Lydia Ouma Radoli (Kenya) and Julia Gyemant (Germany).

Nantume received a KAAD scholarship in 2017. In 2019 she earned an M.F.A. from HFBK Hamburg, in 2019, the same year she won a DAAD Prize for exceptional achievement by non-German students.

Nantume was born in Masaka. She lives and works in Kampala, Uganda.