Louise Deininger
Louise Deininger, born in Jinja/Uganda and raised in Kenya ,she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She lives and works in Vienna/Austria and Gulu City, North-Uganda. She is part of blaxTARLINES Kumasi, an Art-centre and Incubator at the Art Acadamy KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana.
As an African conceptual Artist she weaves together collective memory, materiality, and meaning into acts of decolonial reclamation and identity formation. The present becomes comprehensible through its reflected connection to the past and—in a broader context—through its understood interconnectedness with world history.
Deininger works with materials that pulse with past lives: Acrylic paint on canvas, along with earth and dung from the elephant, her lineage totem animal. Along with repurposing and recontextualizing consumer waste and ready-mades that scoff at the excesses of our consumer culture. Sheincorporates traditional bark cloth, tea bags steeped in colonial exploitation, beads, cowrie shells, kanga cloths, and crochet threads tied to spiritual and ancestral practices.
Her works unleash an immediate emotional impact, are captivating, spiritually inspiring and at the same time encourage reflection on one’s own existence. Her materials bear stories of displacement, violence, colonialism, racism, resilience, reclamation. Her works thus challenge non-Africans to confront their own history, with all its claims to dominance and offenses of imperialist violence.
Deininger’s work constantly shifts between sculpture, installation, social engagement, stylized paintings, and painting, as well film, performance, photo collages. She re-acquires African history and puts it into context of colonialism and post-colonialism. She says:“ It is soul work for me. Through a process of hybridity, I am stitching and molding together what has been ripped apart: Black memory, land, identity, and spirituality.“ She points out: „My works are never mine alone—they are choruses of ancestral hands, earthly elements, and an insistent hope to see a place made whole again.“
