Overview participating exhibitions
Der Aa-kerk
2017
Der Aa-kerk
Andrea Stultiens
STAYING ALIVE: DOCUMENTING THE UGANDA CANCER INSTITUTE (2012)
Photographs played a major role in the nineteen sixties in the formation of the Uganda Cancer Institute in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. The Irish surgeon Denis Parsons Burkitt lost his right eye during an accident at the age of eleven, but compensated for this loss with his camera. He travelled across Africa to photograph children with swelling in their jaws, stomachs and legs, convinced that this was one and the same disease.
By charting the distribution area of the disease he was able to establish a connection with the pattern of malaria, which is spread by mosquitos. In 1964, it was officially named Burkitt lymphoma. The Lymphoma Treatment Center is one of the two in patient treatment facilities of the Uganda Cancer Institute that was subsequently founded in Kampala in 1967. As part of a larger project Andrea Stultiens invited John Nyende and Coleb Butungi, both medical illustrators, to make drawings of the photographs commissioned by oncologists in the late nineteen sixties of patients. The selection here shows only patients with Burkitt’s lymphoma. The translation from photograph to drawing maintains the privacy of those portrayed. It also makes it less traumatising to look at the sometimes shocking effects of the tumors on the body and takes away taboos of gender and nudity that would, specially in Uganda, make it impossible to show these photographs in public.
Making Oneself
2015
Making Oneself
Andrea Stultiens
Kitgum Studios, 2006
Kitgum is a provincial city in the north of Uganda and lies in the heart of the region that for decades has been terrorised by Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army. Not long after Kony and his rebel movement left the region, the first photography studio returned to the city in 2006. In 2011, there were six studios in operation in Kitgum. A visit to all of these locations became a world tour.
The Sequel
2013
The Sequel
Andrea Stultiens
Between 1932 and the mid-1960s the chemist Paul Julien (1901-2001) made a number of trips to sub-Saharan Africa. He had an intense interest in anthropology, and an insatiable appetite for travel. Julien, in conventional daily life a chemistry instructor, measured people, took blood samples, wrote up his travels, photographed and filmed. He was a tourist, explorer and researcher, all rolled up in one. He lectured about his adventures, including on the radio for the Dutch broadcaster KRO, and published four books with accounts of his trips. In The Netherlands alone they ran through multiple editions, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
Since 2001 Andrea Stultiens has also been travelling to Africa regularly. The initial culture shock led to her setting up and carrying out projects. To date this has resulted in three publications, a number of exhibitions, and the historic photo platform History In Progress Uganda. Her projects always concern the relation we have to the other, and the ways that photography can – or can not – visualize them.
Archive materials – texts, photos, official documents – play an important role in all of Stultiens's projects. For The Sequel Stultiens took the work pf Paul Julien and her own photography in Africa as her starting point. Stultiens places Julien's work, which sometimes seems to testify to colonial arrogance and prejudices, and other times to doubts about the significance of his own perceptions, in an historical perspective. She sought contact with historians in a number of the countries where Julien worked, and on the basis of their comments she herself photographed Nigeria, Uganda and Liberia. The result is work in which we become conscious of our gaze as an outsider and are challenged to reflect on it, while because of this approach the photos sometimes give away something that slips past us in a superficial examination. This presentation is the beginning of a larger research project involving the value of Paul Julien's work for today's Africa, and for the non-African viewer.Andrea Stultiens (b. Netherlands, 1974) studied photographic design at the HKU, Utrecht School of the Arts and photography at Post-St. Joost in Breda. She took her MA in the Masters Photographic Studies at Leiden University. She is not only a photographer, but collects related material and reflects – through her own and found images and texts – on the way in which we visualize ourselves and others. Since 2007 Stultiens has worked primarily in Africa, and in particular in Uganda. In 2011 she was the initiator for the platform History In Progress Uganda, which collects and shares historic photos from and about Uganda, to provide them with stories in an attempt to nuance the historiography of that country. Stultiens has published several photo books and is an instructor and researcher at the Minerva Academy in Groningen.
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Andrea Stultiens
MUCH HAS CHANGED (1932-2013)
photo: Paul Julien
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Andrea Stultiens
MUCH HAS CHANGED (1932-2013)
photo: Paul Julien
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Andrea Stultiens
MUCH HAS CHANGED (1932-2013)
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Andrea Stultiens
MUCH HAS CHANGED (1932-2013)
Multivocal Histories
2009
Multivocal Histories
Andrea Stultiens
THE KADDU WASSWA ARCHIVE (Uganda, 2008-2010)
You stumble across the best stories by accident. In 2008 Andrea Stultiens was in Uganda, where she met Kaddu Wasswa, an old man who had recorded the sometimes dramatic course of his life in an extensive archive of photographs, texts and documents. Kaddu had grown up under the British colonial administration and lived through the years of Idi Amin's reign of terror. Ten of his 18 children had died of AIDS. He had worked as a geologist, bookseller, shopkeeper, novelist, theatre maker, inventor and human rights activist – among other things. In collaboration with Kaddu and his grandson Stultiens is using the archive to unravel the story of a man and his country.
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THE KADDU WASSWA ARCHIVE (Uganda, 2008-2010)
You stumble across the best stories by accident. In 2008 Andrea Stultiens was in Uganda, where she met Kaddu Wasswa, an old man who had recorded the sometimes dramatic course of his life in an extensive archive of photographs, texts and documents. Kaddu had grown up under the British colonial administration and lived through the years of Idi Amin's reign of terror. Ten of his 18 children had died of AIDS. He had worked as a geologist, bookseller, shopkeeper, novelist, theatre maker, inventor and human rights activist – among other things. In collaboration with Kaddu and his grandson Stultiens is using the archive to unravel the story of a man and his country.
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THE KADDU WASSWA ARCHIVE (Uganda, 2008-2010)
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THE KADDU WASSWA ARCHIVE (Uganda, 2008-2010)
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THE KADDU WASSWA ARCHIVE (Uganda, 2008-2010)
