On View: May 6- September 30, 2026
Location: BAM, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217
SUMMARY
MoCADA is honored to participate as a BAM DanceAfrica 20256art partner. Meet Sanaa “The Bead King” Gateja”, the visual artist MoCADA selected to represent Uganda in this year’s festival, and see his magical work on view at BAM throughout the celebration.
This Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s largest festival dedicated to African diasporic dance and music opens Brooklyn’s stages and streets to the rich culture and artistry of Uganda. Now in its 49th year, DanceAfrica at Brooklyn Academy of Music will honor the East African nation’s past, celebrate its present, and rejoice in its future.
To coincide with the festival, each year MoCADA collaborates with BAM to present a special public art installation that contextualizes the year’s theme. For 2026, the theme, Umoja/Mirembe/Obulungi (Unity/Peace/Beauty)!, the work of Sanaa Gateja will live in the lobby of BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building from May 6- September 30, 2026.
SELECTED WORK
Using bark cloth as canvas, Sanaa Gateja concocts works of ornate beadwork that invoke pointillism in their vivid imagining. “Voices of Peace” (2023) produces different viewing experiences from afar and up close. In its full scale: colors blur in a rendition of fifteen figures standing before a forest ablaze, an ode to peace and the importance of environmental protections. Up close, each vibrant bead represents the labor of rolling post-consumer paper (offering glimpses of posters, pamphlets, or textbooks), and these constellations beget smaller masterworks embedded in a larger tapestry.
Through a uniquely singular practice, Gateja, also known as “The Bead King,” produces work that demands extended viewing, as each closer investigation reveals new aesthetic and thematic moments.
Voices of Peace
Sanaa Gateja
2023
Paper beads on bark cloth
80 x 62 1/2 inches
SG-23-006
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sanaa Gateja (b. 1950, Kisoro, Uganda) makes intricate works from post-consumer paper that he rolls into beads, sewing them onto bark cloth supports in tapestry-like assemblages. Up close, the beads offer glimpses, between folds, of their past lives—as vintage posters, pages from wig sales pamphlets, and outdated textbooks, among other things. His distinctive method requires the involvement of members of his community, whom he has trained and employed since the early 1990s. Gateja envisions artists as agents for social, political, and environmental transformation, and art-making as an act of ecological and spiritual repair. Disrupting conventional distinctions between figuration and abstraction, and two-dimensional work and sculpture, the resulting swirling, mosaic-like pieces instead draw affective connections between people and their surroundings. Gateja lives in Kampala, Uganda.
Gateja had his first American solo exhibition at Karma in 2023 and was included in the Carnegie International (2022). His works are held in museums and private collections worldwide including the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Field Museum, Chicago; National Scottish Museum, Edinburgh; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has exhibited at institutions and fairs including ARCOlisboa; Cape Town Art Fair; FNB Art Joburg, Johannesburg; Art Paris; AKAA Paris; Themes & Variations, London; and the Museum of Art and Design, New York.
Gateja represented the Ugandan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
