Uganda's 'Bead King' Sanaa Gateja shows paper-bead tapestries in Kampala until 21 November

Sanaa Gateja, the Ugandan artist nicknamed the “Bead King”, makes tapestries from discarded paper that he cuts and rolls into beads and stitches onto bark cloth. Asked in a 2018 interview with Matt Kayem, published by Africanah, an Amsterdam-based website on contemporary African art, why he carries the name, he said: “It's because I introduced the paper bead in the country but I also make beads from many other materials.”

His solo show “They Too Are the Earth” opened on 19 September at Afriart Gallery, Plot 110-112, 7th Street, Industrial Area, Kampala, and runs until 21 November. It is curated by Daudi Karungi. The title is borrowed from a poem by Niyi Osundare, and the gallery's press release says the exhibition “asks what becomes possible when we look again at the things we have been taught to overlook.”

The show has three strands: paper-bead tapestries on bark cloth, new works on banana fibre, and found root sculptures. The press release illustrates three pieces. “Queen Mother” (2025) and “Generation” (2026) are paper beads on bark cloth, each 178 by 121 cm. “Bliss” (2026), 52.5 by 49 cm, combines paper beads, raffia, acrylics, bark cloth and wood.

In one body of work Gateja turns the pages of a book on the Ugandan artist Henry Mzili Mujunga into beads, so that traces of Mujunga's work sit inside his own. The gallery calls this “not an erasure, but a form of preservation and transmission.”

The root and driftwood pieces begin as roots of trees that were cut, burnt or abandoned, according to the press release. Weather, insects, fire and animals had shaped them by the time Gateja found them. His part, the release says, is to recognise and position them.

Gateja was born in 1950 in Kisoro, according to the CV Afriart publishes. The CV lists interior design in Brighton, art and design in Florence and London, including a jewellery studio in Florence and Camden Art Centre, and gemmology at the National Institute of Gemmology in Madagascar.

The press release traces his interest in materials to a rural childhood: he recalls children throwing leaves, stones and pieces of wood into streams to see what floated and what sank. In the 2018 interview he said “there was so much inspiration around me growing up” and “My mother and aunt wore a lot jewelry.” He also described what he makes beads from: “clay, bark cloth, glass, banana fiber, seeds, larva stone and so forth.”

Karma, a gallery in New York and Los Angeles that has given him solo shows in both cities, says on its website that he has worked with community members whom he has trained and employed since the early 1990s.

He had two solo shows in Nairobi in 1980, at the Rowland Ward Gallery and the African Heritage Gallery, and took part in a 1990 group show at the Kenya National Museum and the 2025 group show “It Resonates” at Heltz House in Nairobi. The Nairobi Museum is among the collections that hold his work.

Outside East Africa, he was included in the 2022 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in the United States, and the Uganda Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His solo shows include the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (2023), Karma in New York (2023) and Los Angeles (2024), and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (2025). The Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Field Museum in Chicago are among the collections listed. His previous solo at Afriart, “Radical Care”, was in 2022.

The press release also sets out what it calls his philosophical position: that Africa's wealth is not limited to minerals extracted from the ground but lies also in the environment, climate, language, inherited knowledge and traditional materials. It adds that “a discarded newspaper can become a bead. A bead can become a tapestry.”

Afriart Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and on public holidays from 10am to 4pm. The gallery's exhibition page does not list an admission charge. Enquiries: [email protected] or +256 701 630 640.