Letaru Dralega

Letaru Dralega is a conceptual artist based in Kampala. She experiments across collage, marbling, painting, installation and sound to create meditative works and to contemplate belonging, memory and healing as they relate to the African/Afro-diasporic postcolonial condition. A social scientist by training she studied a Bachelors of Social Sciences (2014) and a Masters of International Development with African studies (2019) at Sciences Po Paris both of which inform her research focused approach to art-making. Letaru is an alumna of Asiko Art School (Praia 2022) and  32°East ( 2017) and co-founded the Afropocene Studio Lab Co-arts space in 2021.

Dralega’s practice is centred around re-framing history and using the process of iconography to invite viewers to meditation. The result is a fierce gradient of vivid colours and textures reminiscent of natural stone, oceans and galaxies. She creates marbled backgrounds by floating oil paint, sprays paint and inks on water, before placing a piece of paper on top to make a print.  The limited control over the outcome of the patterns makes the marbled background for the icons a process of letting go in the process of creation. The gold flakes are a process of beautification of what the circumstances have provided – for her both necessary steps in reconciling with the historical mass traumas.