About this exhibition

Blankets & Wine - Oeganda, December 2019

With her photographic portraits of young people at the festival Blankets & Wine, Nathalie Dijkman shows an underexposed side of Uganda. Who are the Ugandan youth? How do they express themselves in a country where human rights are increasingly under pressure and where the LGBTQ+ community is not accepted in public life? The generation captured by Nathalie is engaging with the latest trends in music, fashion, art and entrepreneurship, challenging the Western, learned representation of East Africa as a place of sheer poverty and violence.

The Blankets & Wine festival is an event where music and art triumph and where the freedom of self-expression - a human right - is palpable. As long as justice cannot be achieved through the courts, it is cultivated all the more through initiatives like this one. According to Nathalie, it is therefore important that we continue to actively seek out and witness 'that which wants to show itself', lest we (unwittingly) suppress the development of countries like Uganda.

Goal

The goal of this exhibition:

Nathalie, director of the Amsterdam Law Hub, founded the SEMA Foundation five years ago in her second homeland, Uganda, where she has been spending a lot of time ever since. Despite her intense involvement, she is an expat and by necessity views the country through the lens of a European. Yet she refuses to put on the glasses of 'white saviour' or 'humanitarian', instead striving for a perspective of equality. Thus, she uses her analogue camera to constantly meet the population with new eyes.