Akimana traces his art voyage in exhibition

Fabian Akimana’s visual art exhibition dubbed My ID is a documentation of his journey as an artist over the years. The exhibition, which started on Friday will run until January 20, next year at Umubano Hotel in Kacyiru. It features 25 unique art pieces including 22 best pieces from his 2015 art collection. The other three are: The Same Flowers, Small but Grown Up and Intore. They all symbolize his first styles from 2008 to 2010. Of his 2015 pieces, Education for all stands for remembrance of the pain he suffered when he was still a recruit artist at Ivuka Art Centre. “I did an exhibition at some city restaurant and at the end of it, the unscrupulous owner of that particular restaurant stole all my remaining art pieces. I created this painting to look like the original. I loved the original and people also admired it a lot during the exhibition,” he explains. The piece shows a mother holding her young boy by the hand and her young girl by the head as they trek to school, with heavy school bags strapped on their backs. The piece about balance depicts a woman and her husband walking together to unforeseen future to have family. The unborn children are painted in overcast colors that obscure them and you must possess a sharp eye for colour to notice them. The mother is carrying a small child on her back. Both are peasant parents-from the rich use of colours and the manner they’re portrayed. The use of background blurred colours clearly indicates they’re on a journey of unpredictable future. But one art piece conspicuously stands out to show the diminutive 25-year-old artist’s rich knowledge of the country’s history. Virgin Ndabaga is a heroic tale of a woman by the same name who, during pre-colonial period, intrepidly made her king to stop a war through her daring deed. Akimana painted this heroic woman clenching her fist in the air as she jumps triumphantly, perhaps to celebrate her feat. She was born the only child in her family and during this turbulent time, when you had a youthful boy who could take part in the war, then you were not obliged to participate in it. However, you had to fight if you were a man who had only girls or had no child. Akimana,25, is a self-taught artist who has created a name for himself as a talented painter. (Joseph Oindo) Realizing her father’s predicament, Ndabaga disguised herself as a boy, using traditional medicine to obliterate her breasts. She fought for many years until one fighter discovered her true gender and reported the discovery to the king. But the king, instead of punishing her for this ruse, decided to immediately end the war. Akimana says: “This story inspired my other two pieces about gender balance. People should aspire to win together, irrespective of their gender.” Two other pieces at the exhibition that show the painter’s unique styles are Love Is a Crush and City of Joy and Peace. He combines both expressionism abstract and constructivism to create new styles. Love Is a Crush is an abstract piece depicting a man and woman kissing while showing different body patterns, illustrating the dissonance found in love. “In modern life, one person is intensely in love while the other shows opposite reaction. Unrequited love in modern relationships has proved to be a nuisance to real love, and led even the venerable institution of marriage to become wretched,” he explains. He calls City of Joy and Peace real constructivism expressionism. There are many houses standing tall but embedded together. “However, these houses have no windows and doors among other structures that make a normal house, making it a different style of art,” he says. The artist’s deep love for nature makes its entry in the form of a piece of abstract paintings of several pigeons flying to different places to make peace. “Pigeons are symbols of peace,” he says, “and using them the way I did is my desire to show that the world should be a safe place to live in without the unnecessary rancour and wars we today experience.” However, despite such rich display of beautiful paintings that have significant messages to the society, only a handful attended its opening. His works can be found at Umubano Hotel, in Kacyiru. (Joseph Oindo)

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Akimana traces his art voyage in exhibition