‘Spears’ by Jim Joel is a photo collection of spears from the archive of the National Uganda Museum to activate part of the archive. Jim saw the spears during a museum workshop in December 2019, when the museum invited a group of artists to visit the stores to engage with the artefacts. For Jim, the diversity of spear designs in the archive provide evidence that people from across East Africa have always passed through and lived in Uganda, and in turn, call into question the permanence of borders.
The photographs were displayed as part of the collaborative ‘Temporary Exhibition’ for the Art, Archive and Activism project alongside excerpts from the poem, ‘Reaching within us to beyond us’, by Susan Kiguli, and work from Shohrab Jahan, Emilie Flower. The spear photographs were printed to the size of a human figure and displayed opposite the permanent exhibition cases in the main hall of the Uganda National Museum.
Jim is continuing his work in the museum archives.
A short film about Jim’s thoughts behind the ‘Spears’ photo series documenting the process of photographing the Spears archive in the Uganda National Museum.