Undone – Group Show

In Undone, artists Charlene Komuntale and Sarah Waiswa present a powerful meditation on the layered negotiations of womanhood in the face of cultural, historical, and systemic constraints. Their practices, distinct yet in deep dialogue, offer slow, deliberate responses to entrenched ideologies—responses that unravel the myths, aesthetics, and expectations that govern the female body.

Together, the artists destabilize the viewer’s gaze, not to present solutions, but to invite viewers into a space where the personal is rendered political, and where transformation begins not with answers, but with the audacity to ask different questions. Undone reframes the female subject not as a symbol to be decoded, but as a site of multiplicity—unfixed, intimate, and wholly sovereign.

Komuntale’s work centers the Black female figure at the threshold of transformation. Through the symbolic act of loosening corsets—objects historically designed to shape, constrict, and idealize—she reveals not only the physical body but the unseen systems that bind it. Beading, embroidery, and installation extend the metaphor, drawing attention to the cultural scripts sewn into our understanding of beauty and value. Her work resists tidy conclusions; instead, it makes space for uncertainty, asking who has authored our ideals, and what it might mean to let them go.

Waiswa, in turn, constructs images that interrupt societal narratives around fulfillment and femininity. Her series Wild Fires gently confronts the taboo of chosen childlessness in contemporary Kenya, layering portraits with collage elements—archival fragments, magazine clippings—that speak to the myths women inherit and the silence they often endure. Her visual language is one of quiet defiance: not a spectacle of resistance, but a sustained act of reclamation. In her hands, the female subject is never simplified, never fully exposed, and never passive.

afriartgallery.org