Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa's 'A Short Video About Tate Modern' (2005) is a response to questions of visibility and voice within a British art museum.

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Incognegro, 2003

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, 1976 – 2023

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa died in 2023. Born in Glasgow to Ugandan parents, she read English Literature at Cambridge and worked as a theatre scriptwriter before taking her MFA at the Slade School of Art in London. She worked between Uganda, South Africa, England and Norway, and lived for a time in Germany.

Her work engaged colonial archives, memorial practices and art education, and she was committed to anti-colonial and decolonial thinking. Carrying Yours and Standing Between You, shown at The Showroom in London in 2018 and 2019, assembled documents, photographs and records to reconstruct the life of the pan-African anti-colonial activist Amy Ashwood Garvey, and in doing so exposed how archival categories have worked to erase Black women from history.

In 2015 she founded the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster in Kampala and remained its principal convenor, a body of work that also formed part of the doctorate she was still writing at the University of Bergen. In 2019 she began Oi!, a project for young people from minority backgrounds who had experienced racism, first shown at Bergen Assembly.

She showed in KISSS in the Body Fortress strategy and in the screening programme at Castlefield Gallery in 2008.

In Memoriam: Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (1976–2023), written collectively by members of the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster, by members of the Oi! group she worked with in Bergen, and by Bodil Furu, Claudia del Fierro and Alessandra Ferrini, published by e-flux.