Welcome to my collection of Kampala's urban folklore turned into vibrant pop art. Each piece you see here began as a rain-soaked poster or a fading ad on a city tree. These are more than mere advertisements - they’re stories of hope, belief, and resilience, transformed into framed art that preserves a slice of Kampala’s soul. Explore the gallery and take home a piece of the city’s unique spirit.
I am inspired by the streets of Kampala, where creativity blooms in the most unexpected ways. The 'Doctor' posters—offering everything from lost love to business success—are both a reflection of cultural beliefs and a raw form of urban expression. By collecting these posters and framing them as pop art, I aim to preserve their charm and spark conversations about the intersections of hope, humor, and urban life. Each piece is a tribute to the vibrant stories hidden in plain sight.
It is talent and creativity in a urban setting; something that beats within the city of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. These are not just posters- they are voices of hope, stories of struggling and indeed calliopes of change. Recently there ‘Doctor’ advertisements of photocopy can be seen pasted on walls, trees and electric poles, thus they have a place in the city’s commercial identity which can be turned into an irony. Every fraying seam and worn out font means a person and a request to find a resolution for life’s problems.
For me, this became the backdrop to which this aggressively real and unfiltered story unfolded; thus, I started saving these posters, particularly after rainfall, as the dark colours would run and blur into rather aesthetically pleasing hues. While to some observer boring and ridiculous, the action acquires bright references to survival, faith, and endurance. When framing such pieces, it is not so much about the physical conservation; rather, it is mnemonic conservation.
Such art is my expression of the ‘heavenly’ and the ‘mundane’ or the ‘divine’ and the ‘secular.’ These framed works depict the experiences of the city especially alongside complexities of the modern society and clearly an interplay of traditions and advancements. A so-called office paper with texts in big letters, shocking unpolitical claims and very bad designed fragmented paper is both irony and tribute to the creativity, inventiveness and dreaming of the people in Kampala.
Whenever you introduce one of these framed arts into your home you bring in a slice of Kampala spirit thus the human effort to look for solutions, may be pragmatic or mythical. It’s a ray of pop art with a pulse, that started on the sidewalk and rose up replete with pride in a culture and skill to create something magical out of the mundane.
More to read!