Chai & Cinema III
Exhibition Title: Chai and Cinema 3: A Seat at the Table
Exhibition Type: Site-Specific Guerrilla Exhibition & Media Advocacy Intervention
Event Context: Uganda Media Week 2025 (Annual Gathering of National Media Practitioners)
Venue: Four Points by Sheraton, Kampala, Uganda
Dates: November 16th – November 17th, 2025
Target Audience: Investigative journalists, editors, media houses, and cultural broadcasters
Core Medium: Architectural Photography Diptychs, Hand-Sculpted Clay Head Busts, Dry Spices, and Integrated Conference Amenities
"Chai and Cinema 3: A Seat at the Table" was staged as a radical, site-specific spatial intervention at the Four Points by Sheraton during Uganda Media Week 2025. This third iteration of the ongoing series moved out of traditional galleries and academic lecture halls, planting its visual research directly onto the conference tables of the country's leading media practitioners, editors, and journalists. The installation functioned as a physical act of advocacy—demanding a permanent "seat at the table" for cultural heritage journalism within mainstream media spaces that remain chronically awash with political headlines but afford little to no space for heritage documentation.
The strategy deliberately subverted the traditional conference room layout by treating individual practitioner desks as gallery walls. To provoke the gathered press corps, hand-sculpted clay head busts were placed directly alongside archival-contemporary cinema photography diptychs on their tables. Finding raw clay busts sitting adjacent to standard corporate conference water bottles, pens, and hotel note pads immediately disrupted the corporate atmosphere. It forced journalists to question why these tactile, human forms were occupying their working desks. The intervention directly critiqued the media's tendency to only cover architectural heritage when it erupts into high-profile corporate or legal warfare such as the volatile courtroom battles between Watoto Church (Norman Cinema) and the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA).
Disrupting the Corporate Matrix
To anchor the discussion in shared intangible heritage, the table layouts integrated three meticulously balanced elements:
The Investigative Diptychs: Curated photography pairs juxtaposing 1970s cinematic hubs with their modern-day functional transformations, formatted into custom cardholders designed to mimic hotel amenities.
The Material Provocation: Raw, hand-sculpted clay busts that physically manifested the human memory, labor, and ancestral weight embedded within the city's disappearing structures.
The Sensory Prompts: Layouts of raw tea spices placed directly within the conference stationery setup. As journalists handled the cardamom, ginger, and cloves, the familiar aromas triggered informal table discussions, prompting media professionals to consider how lifestyle, trade, and architectural history form the bedrock of national identity.
Featured Artworks.
By seamlessly embedding the cinema archive into the physical architecture of Uganda Media Week, Chai and Cinema 3 effectively brought the story directly into the engine rooms of the country's primary newsrooms. The exhibition challenged the media to look beyond immediate political cycles and commit to archiving the enduring, structural narratives of their changing cities.
Installation views
