At a festival built around human rights, Vincent Kyabayinze says the difficult question is not only whether artists can speak, but what happens when people do not like what they say.
A painting can hang quietly on a wall. Then somebody recognises themselves in it. A film can begin as an artistic interpretation of a social problem, until the people watching it decide that the subject is too uncomfortable.
A post can appear harmless on social media, until a few comments become threats and an artist begins wondering whether the work should remain online.
For artists working around human rights and social issues, the space between expression and consequence can be narrow. It is a tension that East African Visual Artists (EAVA) has encountered repeatedly through the work it does with artists, filmmakers and other creatives.
As the organisation prepares for the fifth Human Rights Are Universal Arts Festival at Xenson Art Space in Kamwokya from October 9 to 17, that tension sits naturally alongside this year’s theme, “Threads of Belonging.”
The festival brings together visual art, film, performance, music, literature and dialogue around questions of identity, dignity, inclusion and shared humanity. But the artists who enter that space do not necessarily arrive with comfortable stories.
Some are interested in domestic violence. Others examine inequality, social justice, governance, democracy, economic hardship or the lives of people who are usually spoken about rather than listened to. And sometimes the work itself becomes controversial.
Vincent Kyabayinze, EAVA’s founder and executive director, says artists working in this territory have been questioned and threatened over their work, although he says the organisation has not had an artist arrested.
The pressure does not always come through formal institutions. Sometimes it comes from other people online. An artist posts a piece, and before a formal complaint is made, the comments begin.
Questions about who is funding the work. Why is the artist doing it? What agenda lies behind it. Threats of what might happen next. For some artists, that is enough to make them remove the work.
Kyabayinze says this is one of the less visible ways in which artistic expression can be restricted, not necessarily through an official ban, but through intimidation that persuades an artist to silence themselves.
EAVA has a legal support mechanism for artists whose work attracts such attention. The first response, he says, is often to understand what is happening and help the artist navigate the conversation. That support matters because the artist is not necessarily looking for a confrontation.
Sometimes, the issue is simply that someone wants an explanation for why a particular piece was produced. But beneath those individual cases lies a larger question of, who protects artists when the people producing work in defence of human rights also find their own rights under pressure?
It is a question Kyabayinze himself describes as, essentially, who defends the defender. The answer is not always to make the art louder. In fact, he argues for almost the opposite. He is wary of turning socially engaged art into propaganda.
If an artist wants to address domestic violence, for example, the solution is not necessarily to paint a picture and write across it “Say no to domestic violence”. For him, that reduces art to a poster. Instead, he argues, the work should retain its artistic integrity and leave room for interpretation.
A painting of a bruised woman crying can communicate domestic violence without spelling out the message. The viewer sees the image, interprets it and brings their own experience into the encounter.
That interpretation is part of the work. “Art should never, at any point, be a poster,” Kyabayinze says.
It is a philosophy that helps explain EAVA’s unusual position between artistic practice and advocacy. The organisation works with creatives because it believes art can communicate experiences in ways that conventional advocacy may not.
Kyabayinze’s own examples come from projects that have stayed with him.
One was Life on the Street, a documentary about women engaged in sex work. Rather than stopping at the label, the project followed one woman, Diana, into her family life, where she was a mother, daughter, sister and sole breadwinner. Her story complicated the easy assumptions that can surround people whose lives are discussed from the outside.
Another documentary, A Silent Disease, examined substance abuse through the story of an educated man whose life changed after he was introduced to drugs by a friend. For Kyabayinze, such stories matter because they force audiences to look beyond the surface of a social problem.
The same approach appears in EAVA’s visual work. A mural addressing domestic violence, for instance, can put an issue into a public space where people encounter it without having deliberately gone looking for a human-rights campaign.
The art becomes part of the city. And that is where the relationship between artistic freedom and public engagement becomes complicated.
The artist needs freedom to explore uncomfortable subjects. The audience needs freedom to interpret and disagree. Yet both exist within a society where expression can have consequences. EAVA’s festival has increasingly become one place where those tensions can be held in public.
The previous edition, held at Xenson Art Space under the theme “Defend”, brought together more than 65 artists and included exhibitions, performances, workshops and panel discussions. EAVA described the event as a space where art and human-rights advocacy could meet without separating creative expression from civic conversation.
This year’s festival continues that approach, but with a different question. “Threads of Belonging” asks what connects people at a time when technology is changing relationships, communication and identity.
One of the programme’s discussions, “Our Lives Online”, will sit alongside a digital hub where participants can receive information about data protection, authentication and stronger online security. The festival will also include an information exhibition, health camp, performances, film, music, dance and the visual arts residency exhibition.
The programme suggests that artistic freedom cannot be separated entirely from the conditions in which artists live and work. An artist cannot meaningfully participate in public conversation if fear has already persuaded them to remove their work.
But Kyabayinze’s argument is also that artists carry responsibilities. EAVA takes participating artists through the laws and rights relevant to their work and stresses that defending expression does not mean endorsing abuse or personal attacks.
There is therefore a line between challenging an audience and deliberately harming another person.
Finding that line is part of the difficult work. It is also why Kyabayinze resists the idea that socially engaged art must always arrive with a ready-made answer. The artist can raise the question. The viewer can wrestle with it. The conversation can continue beyond the gallery.
That may be the more difficult form of activism, one that does not tell an audience exactly what to think, but refuses to let uncomfortable subjects disappear.
At Xenson Art Space this October, the paintings, films, performances and conversations of the fifth Human Rights Are Universal Arts Festival will once again occupy that space.
Between the artist and the audience lies the possibility of disagreement. Between the artwork and the society around it lies consequence. And somewhere between those two sits the fragile freedom that allows art to say what ordinary conversation sometimes cannot.