ART COLOGNE 2025: Marc Henry, Acaye Kerunen & Maximilian Prüfer

Acaye Kerunen 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.