Uganda's Sanaa Gateja shows paper-bead works and root sculptures in Kampala

Sanaa Gateja, the Ugandan artist known as the "Bead King", is holding a solo show at Afriart Gallery in Kampala. The work he is best known for starts as discarded paper: in the gallery's description, the paper is cut and rolled into beads, and the beads are threaded and stitched onto bark cloth. "I like the Africanness of handling materials, the aesthetics and the value that we attach to materials," he said, as quoted by the Observer on 2 July 2025.

The show, "They too Are the Earth", is at Plot 110-112, 7th Street, in Kampala's Industrial Area, from 19 September to 21 November 2026. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm. The curator is Daudi Karungi.

The title comes from a poem by Niyi Osundare. In its press release the gallery says the poem treats the earth as more than soil: it is also "the lives, labour, wounds, and forgotten presences that sustain the world". Gateja, it says, gives that idea material form with discarded paper, banana fibre, bark cloth, raffia, roots and weathered wood.

The show has three groups of work: paper-bead works on bark cloth, new works on banana fibre, and found root sculptures. Two pieces are named in the press release. Healing (2026) is made of paper beads and acrylics on bark cloth and measures 206 by 98 cm. Messenger of Peace (2026) is found wood and volcanic stone, 51 by 20 by 65 cm.

In one body of work Gateja has turned the pages of a book on the Ugandan artist Henry Mzili Mujunga into beads. The release calls this "a form of preservation and transmission".

The gallery traces his way of working to a childhood in the countryside. He recalls children throwing leaves, stones and pieces of wood into streams to see what floated and what sank, the release says.

Afriart's CV gives his birth as 1950 in Kisoro, Uganda, and lists studies in Florence and London. Karma, a gallery that has shown him, says that in 1970 he managed Uganda's crafts pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka for the Ministry of Culture and Community Development. It says he then founded Sanaa Gallery, which it calls the first art gallery in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.

Kenya runs through the CV. It lists two solo shows in Nairobi in 1980, at the African Heritage Gallery and the Rowland Ward Gallery, and a 1990 group show at the Kenya National Museum with Kamal Shah. The Nairobi Museum is among the collections that hold his work.

He returned to Uganda in 1990, according to Afriart, and Karma lists him as the founder that year of the Kwetu Africa Art and Design Development Centre. He makes his works with local artisans, mainly women, who recycle magazines, textbooks, pamphlets and newspapers, dye them and roll them into beads about three-quarters of an inch long, the Observer reported.

Gateja was in the Carnegie International in 2022, and in 2024 he was one of the artists in the Uganda pavilion at the Venice Biennale. La Biennale lists the pavilion as "Wan Acel | Tuli Bamu | Turibamwe | We Are One", curated by Acaye Kerunen, at Bragora Gallery in Castello. The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami showed "Language of We", a dozen of his works made over eight years, from 10 May to 23 November 2025.

According to Afriart's CV, his work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Field Museum in Chicago. The press release places him among contemporaries such as El Anatsui, Abdoulaye Konaté, Yinka Shonibare and Magdalene Odundo.