Evans Akanyijuka — Visual Artist · Researcher

My practice exists at the intersection of latent memory and computational seeing. I make work that asks what an image remembers — and what it has been trained to forget. Working primarily with AI-generated imagery, short film, and archival intervention, I move between the ancient and the algorithmic, treating both as living systems of knowledge.

Evans Akanyijuka (b. 1999, Kampala) is a multi-media visual artist working at the intersection of photography, collage, and emerging media. He uses these forms as an inquiry into the relationship between African visual culture, colonial archives, and artificial intelligence, and his work has been exhibited across East Africa, Europe, and North America.

His practice is defined by a refusal to remain fixed within any single medium — moving from photography and collage into animation, immersive 3D environments, and installation. Describing himself as a student of his environment, he treats uncertainty as generative rather than limiting, and approaches generative AI not as a tool of efficiency but as a creative partner: works emerge through what he calls a shared dreaming process, an interplay between human intuition and machine interpretation in which unpredictability is deliberately embraced.

A recurring concern is latency — what is held inside an image, dormant, waiting to be activated. He treats archives as living systems rather than fixed records: propositions of possibility that can be reactivated through what he terms memory injections, where community-generated knowledge intervenes in AI systems to disrupt dominant narratives. He advocates for transparent African AI models that carry local visual languages, built with — not extracted from — the communities they represent, with contributors retaining ownership and visibility over their own images.

He has been in residence at 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust (Kampala), African Digital Heritage (Historian in Residence), Afropocene StudioLab, and the S+T+ARTS Afropean Intelligence programme with Market Photo Workshop (Johannesburg).

Bodies of work

• Battle of Kagogo (2023–) — A research-based body of work inquiring into the pre-colonial war that took place in South West Uganda in the 18th Century. Working through collage and photography, the work excavates a history that sits outside the colonial archive — a conflict that preceded and exceeded the documentary impulse of the coloniser. The series does not reconstruct or illustrate; it asks what it means to look at a war that was never photographed, through a medium that did not yet exist.
• Toyonoona (2024) — "Whoever sat on a grinding stone was warned they'd have to carry it on their head all the way back to where they were born." This precaution, one of the most fascinating I encountered while Kevin Murungi and I were creating work for the @klaartfestival, touched something deep within me and inspired this piece. Originally, this saying was meant to remind people to keep clean the tools we use to prepare our food, safeguarding the well-being of the household. But it was the imagery of carrying the grinding stone back to one's place of birth that really resonated with me — it stirred thoughts of reconnection, of a longing to return to our roots. This very idea of reconnection shaped the elements in this artwork, like the bag the subject is carrying. This bag, known as "Kampala egaanye" or "Kampala yayanga," a phrase people used when they saw me with it during the photoshoot and in the lead-up to the festival, directly translates to "Kampala has failed." For me, this phrase captures a deep need to step away and rethink the conditions that alienate us from nature in a bid to reconnect.
• Stillness (2024) — Emotional mapping through an AI character called Soren, these are stills that were created for the AI short film.
• The Last (2026) — This archive is an inquiry into the visual language of artificial intelligence. Each image was generated by prompting a machine to render the last photograph ever taken of a specific human moment. The last birthday. The last wedding. The last ordinary day. The machine does not know endings. It knows only what it has seen, the accumulated weight of human image-making, compressed into probability. Yet when asked to picture finality, something emerges. A feeling. A composition. A guess at what loss looks like.
• LoRA as an Archive, A Living Archive (2026) — LoRA as an Archive is the answer to the question posed by ZaZi the 6th Start Challenge, which tasked the respondent to create an AI model that demonstrated generative AI models worked, a transparent or inside out AI model that educated by virtue of interaction while also showing how they used data. Targeting all age groups (toddlers to elders) the model is meant to show in real time what the absence of truly diverse data (as is found in most AI chatbot models used across the globe) can result in — what is sometimes biased, harmful and even incorrect outputs. Evans used the technology of LoRA to create a hack that used pre-existing larger AI models to build the tailored/data specific model that he's titled a Living Archive as it brings to life DATA not otherwise accessed by the typical models, or included in western bias datasets. LoRA as an Archive, A Living Archive was then presented as an audio-visual interactive installation designed to reactivate memory and explore new possibilities within historical media. The project successfully transforms static visual archives into a dynamic, immersive environment through the application of artificial intelligence.

Exhibitions & residencies

• Epeyenon, Kampala (2023)
• Silent Invasions: the art of Material Hacking, Amasaka gallery, Masaka (2023)
• 32° East Residency, 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust, Kampala (2023)
• Afric Artech, Casablanca, Morocco (2026)
• I Love How You Shine… Cos I'm Afraid of the Dark, La Casa Roja, Mexico City (2025)
• S+T+ARTS Afropean Intelligence Residency, S+T+ARTS · Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg / Kampala (hybrid) (2026)
• World Building Residency, Afropocene Studio Lab, Kampala (2025–2026)

Publications & press

• Virtual Worlds: Visual Art — Evans — Visions of Glo (2024)
• Akanyijuka Evans: Within the Depths of the Unrealized — African Digital Heritage (2024)
• Symbiosis of Dreams: Evans Akanyijuka and the Art of Human–AI Collaboration — African Digital Art (2026)
• Afropean Intelligence: The Archive is Alive — S+T+ARTS (2026)
• Culture Catch Up with Banji Chona & Akanyijuka Evans — African Digital Heritage (2024)
• Kevin Murungi and Evans Akanyijuka — Emboozi Z'ebibonerezo — KLA ART Festival (2024)
• Evans Akanyijuka — Artist in Residence — 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust (2023)
• Evans Akanyijuka | Residency at 32° East (video) — 32° East — YouTube (2023)
• La Casa Roja, una ofrenda contemporánea entre la luz y la sombra — Milenio (Mexico) (2025)

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