Walking through Afriart Gallery, you momentarily forget that you are participating in a curated art experience. You are not inside a white cube, but in plein air, transported to Makindye, the hilly Kampala suburb whose abundant foliage and wildlife qualify it as a green oasis in a concrete jungle.
Featuring artwork rendered in watercolour, ink, and even coffee and tea, A Walk in Makindye is a recreation of the morning walks taken by Ugandan artist Mona Taha while commuting between her home and art studio, which ultimately inspired her and birthed this presentation.
Taha has a longstanding affiliation with Afriart Gallery. An alumna of their renowned Surfaces Program, an intensive conceptual development masterclass and overall creative incubator for emerging East African artists, she has participated in several of their group exhibitions including Where the Wild Things are in 2022, and Shapes of Water in 2023. Not only does A Walk in Makindye extend that relationship, it marks Taha’s first solo exhibition and heralds an evolution in her art practice.
While Taha’s earlier work was characterised by bold portraiture, she has now set her sights on landscapes and is leaning towards abstract expressionism which lends a dreamlike atmosphere to her work. However, like the French painter Nicolas de Staël, she is “not setting abstract painting against figurative painting,” and she manages to merge both figurative and abstract elements together. In works like Forest Walk (2025), Fragments of Time (2026), and Reverie (2025), she achieves this fusion with the aid of collage where as in Enchanted Woods (2025) and Voyage into the Oasis (2025), she opts for decoupage.
Furthermore, Taha has dropped the charcoal and graphite that were prominent features in her previous work in favour of cool tones of greens and blues, vivid pinks and purples, and earthy neutrals for contrast. This brighter colour scheme is reminiscent of the dramatic colour palette used by Georgia O’Keeffe, the American modernist painter whom Taha has cited as an influence. Taha has always employed watercolour and ink in her work, but their primacy here as the primary medium allows more fluidity and adds an illusion of motion.
The outlined subject of Voyage into the Oasis (2025) is situated in an interior setting; over her shoulder, the front door is thrown wide open revealing a beautiful landscape that could have served as mere background, but somehow, Taha animates it such that the natural world’s summons to the painting’s subject, and by extension, the viewer, is palpable.
In the rest of the paintings in which human subject and flora appear almost indistinguishable from each other, nature not only beckons, it subsumes. Is this suggesting that interacting with nature is a transcendental experience, capable of altering the individual? A utopian vision for how our species can coexist with others? Where one might be tempted to casually observe, Taha encourages contemplation. This deep regard for, and immense connection to nature is yet another commonality the artist shares with O’Keeffe.
Speaking of contemplation, I am reminded of an O’Keeffe quote: “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.”
Mona Taha has clearly adopted her mentor’s paradigm, and A Walk in Makindye is her way of refracting the natural world to us.
A Walk in Makindye is open to the public until June 13, 2026 at the Afriart Gallery, Plot 110-112, 7th Street, Industrial Area, Kampala, Uganda.
- Photos courtesy of Afriart Gallery and the artist.
**Akumbu Uche is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. Her works have been published by thelagosreview.ng, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, Canthius, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Catch her on X @xoakumbu
