Up close, each bead reveals its past life: a poster, a pamphlet, an outdated textbook, fragments of memory rolled into new form.
Sanaa Gateja (b. 1950, Kisoro, Uganda) is a mixed-media artist and jewellery designer whose practice has made him one of the most celebrated figures of East African contemporary art. Trained in interior design and jewellery between Brighton and Florence, he returned to Uganda carrying a vision of art as an agent of social, economic and environmental transformation.
Gateja is known across Uganda as "The Bead King" for his pioneering fashioning of beads from discarded paper: post-consumer materials, vintage posters, pamphlets and outdated textbooks are rolled into beads and sewn onto bark cloth supports in swirling, mosaic-like assemblages that straddle tapestry, sculpture and installation. Up close, the beads offer glimpses of their past lives, turning each work into an archive of fragments; at a distance, they disrupt conventional distinctions between figuration and abstraction. Alongside paper he works with bark cloth, raffia, wood and banana fibre, allowing each material to speak in its own micro-cosmos while weaving them into abstract narratives on the social and political realities of Uganda. His method is inherently communal: since the early 1990s he has trained and employed members of his community, conceiving art-making as an act of ecological and spiritual repair and as a concrete instrument against poverty.
After decades of exhibitions between East Africa, London and the United States, from the Africa Centre, London (1986), to the Mbari Institute, Washington D.C. (2006), Gateja's international recognition accelerated with his participation in "Is it morning for you yet?", the 58th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2022). In 2024 he represented Uganda at the 60th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include "Rolled Secrets" at Karma, New York (2023), "Sanaa Gateja: Selected Works" at the Currier Museum of Art, New Hampshire (2023), "Nourishment" at Karma, Los Angeles (2024), and "Language of We" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2025). Group exhibitions include "You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry" at Dallas Contemporary (2025) and "In Between Blues" at DaDa, Marrakech (2026). His works are held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the Field Museum, Chicago, Fondation H, Paris, the Commonwealth Institute, London, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle. He lives and works in Kampala.