Acaye Kerunen

Acaye Kerunen (b. 1981 in Kampala, Uganda) is a multidisciplinary performance and installation artist, storyteller, writer, poet actress and activist based in Kampala, Uganda. She graduated with a BSc in Mass Communication from the Islamic University in Uganda, Kampala and obtained a Diploma in Information Systems Management from Aptech. Kerunen’s installations are forged from natural materials locally grown, harvested, dyed, and woven in Uganda, including banana fibre, raffia, reeds, and palm leaves. Through her work, she seeks to dismantle the hierarchies of fine art and craft, elevating women’s labour within socio-political systems. She often commissions local women to create baskets, tablemats, winnowing trays, and other functional items before reimagining them as assemblage installations. Materiality is central to Kerunen’s artistic practice, and her mutable, expansive installations can be understood as living artworks. Through her intuitive use of material, colour, and form, the artist creates enthralling biomorphic abstractions that envelop viewers into their folds. 

Kerunen’s installations are deeply engaged with their environments, at once rooted in history and emancipatory in their resistance to colonialist, patriarchal narratives. Constructed using embroidery, hand stitching, knotting, and weaving techniques she learned from her mother, Kerunen’s artworks embody ancestral knowledge. The labours, songs, and identities of the women in her community reverberate through the fibres of the artist’s finished works. 

The impact of climate change is a central concern of Kerunen’s multifaceted, activist-minded practice. With her regenerative artistic process, Kerunen imagines a future that facilitates and encourages communal living, working, and art making. Her use of natural fibres and dyes, locally sourced from the wetlands surrounding Lake Victoria, is testament to the artist’s strong relationship to the land and people of Uganda. Kerunen has said that her incorporation of banana fibre, banana rind, and raffia in her work “speaks into a very resilient culture and practice of cultivation and living with a conscious relation to the land and regenerating an environment that is being depleted”.

Solo Shows: 

2026: Haus Lange, Kunstmuseum Krefeld; 2025: Neena, aan uthii, Pace Gallery, London; 1246 Days Around the Sun, Institute of Fine Arts, New York; 2024: I Am All These Women, Galerie Kandlhofer, Austria; 2023: A NI EE (I AM HERE), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA Sacred Rain, RAM Galleri, Oslo, Norway; 2021: Iwang Sawa, Afriart Gallery, Kampala, Uganda.

Group Shows:

2024: Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican Art Gallery, London; 2023: The Many Faces of the Self, Ars Belga, Brussels, Belgium; 2022: Radiance: They Dream in Time, Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; 2018: Nyege Nyege Festival, Jinja, Uganda.