Sisterhood
Very early in her career, Victoria Nabulime had to deal with the derisive comments of classmates and teachers who said her work was cartoonish. The comments unsettled but did not deter her. Today her paintings rank among the most exciting works being executed in Uganda today, a remarkable achievement for an artist still in her twenties.
Nabulime, who was born in Kampala in 2002 to the acclaimed sculptor Charles Kamya, has quickly distinguished herself as a superior artist with a distinct visual language centering the female form. Her sympathetic portrayal of the resilience of women – of sisterhood and its great possibilities, as it were – has earned her many followers in recent years, marking her as an artist who will continue to grow in importance.
She sold her first piece, a painting of a flower, for Uganda shillings 50,000 in 2008, when she was six. That’s simply astonishing. And yet, despite growing up in an artist’s home and being surrounded by artistic materials as a little girl, her path has been far from smooth.
While she continued to draw and paint while attending secondary school, at first she never felt there was an artistic career ahead of her. Things changed one day in 2018, when father and daughter went to see a show at Afriart Gallery in Kampala. She felt so inspired by what she saw, she told TWR, that afterwards she told her father that making art is what she wanted to do.
In 2019 she enrolled at Nagenda International Academy of Art and Design, or NIAAD, a tertiary school just off the highway to Entebbe. It was a two-year program, and she was the only girl among nine boys. She recalled in a recent interview that she was bullied by her classmates, and her teachers were not so supportive. “They kept saying, ‘Your cartoons are not going to go anywhere. No one even likes what you are doing.’ Those sorts of words, and they would say it verbally,” Nabulime said of some teachers at NIAAD in an interview with TWR. One classmate told her she was wasting her time when she should learn how to sew.
When she went back home for holidays, she was depressed and told her father so. She wanted to continue her apprenticeship from home – with him – rather than attend formal art school. Yet, in the end, she never dropped out and was actually running ahead of the class. She was one of only three in her cohort to graduate from NIAAD.
Years later, Nabulime tries to see positives in what happened to her at NIAAD. She is so confident in her practice that nothing could put her down. “I think it was a good experience for me too,” she said. “It taught me to work harder and earn my place in an environment where you are being told certain things and people have certain perceptions about you.”
Nabulime said she came into her own after the Silhouette Projects residency program for artists in 2020. She later won a residency with the 32 Degrees art center, where she tried to perfect the singular visual style that she has made her own. In 2025 she had a joint exhibition with Kamya at Umoja Gallery in Kampala, a rare father-daughter show anywhere in the world.
Focusing on the theme of sisterhood comes naturally to her, she said, having grown up in a home dominated by girls. Being one of six sisters at home was beautifully chaotic, she said, noting that there are many opportunities while “playing around with” the female form in painting.
“One thing I like about my work is that it’s comfortable for me,” she said. “If it’s comfortable for me and very flexible for me, then that is it. That is the direction I want to take.”
TWR is pleased to present a dozen paintings from Nabulime’s expanding oeuvre. A good number are works on paper she executed for the Arak Collection, a hoard of African art amassed by a Qatar-based collector, which includes Nabulime’s work in the most recently published catalogue. Other works presented here are acrylic-on-canvas paintings collected by others in Uganda and abroad. ▪
