Charlene Komuntale Uganda, b. 1990

Charlene Komuntale is a mixed-media artist based in Kampala, Uganda. Trained in animation, her journey took her from illustration and digital painting to combining her digital medium with materials and techniques such as textiles, embroidery, and beading. Venturing beyond digital painting into mixed media has been a pivotal moment in her practice.

Komuntale's work examines how ideas of beauty, value and visibility are constructed or inherited. Her practice is particularly interested in the systems that shape how bodies, histories, labour, knowledge and identity are seen and valued. Drawing on personal experience, the lives of women around her, historical texts, and the natural world, she creates works that put inherited narratives in tension with lived experience.

Her ongoing series, Threads, began with the question, "What governs our understanding of beauty?" Through the series, she explores beauty as a site where power, identity and value intersect. The act of unravelling has become a recurring gesture, allowing her to examine inherited ideas, memories and histories. Beadwork, thread and textiles carry histories of adornment, care and often unseen women's labour, while archival materials, books, garments and institutional objects have entered the work as sites through which larger systems of power can be interrogated.

Komuntale's practice is grounded in curiosity and sustained interrogation. Her works create space for reflection, discovery and reclamation.

In 2023, Komuntale held her debut solo exhibition Sit with Me - The Diary of a Free Thinker at Afriart Gallery. Her work was shown in the group exhibitions Undone (AAG, 2025), Eastern Voices: Contemporary Art from East Africa (Addis Fine Art, London, 2023), Shapes of Water (AAG, 2023), Where the Wild Things are (AAG, 2022), among others. She participated in EXPO Chicago, Art Basel Miami Beach, Abu Dhabi Art, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, among other fairs. In 2021, Komuntale attended the Silhouette Projects Residency Program, and in 2023, she was an artist-in-residence at The Mill in Adelaide, Australia. She holds a BA in Animation from Limkokwing University, Malaysia.