Jim Joel Nyakaana is an artist and explorer based in Kampala, Uganda researching cities using photography. He explores cities beyond just the maps and names to places beginning with the interrogation of a place through walking as an aesthetic practice.
He considers his artistic work as explorations and resists the need to sprint so as to immerse himself fully to understand the built environment and the fraught relationship with humans who inhabit these spaces.
The city’s changing identity and influx of new developments are leaving its urban spaces caught in a state of limbo awaiting modern futures while fossilized with the fragments of the past.
This helps him build the narrative of his research on cities within Uganda and beyond while juxtaposing different spaces against each other and using social media and exhibitions as tools to have conversations about our present cities keeping in mind our past.
