”It’s about reclaiming. Giving materials a life and beauty.”
We met Leilah Babirye, a rising star in the art world, whose work defends everybody’s right to be themselves.
”My work has a lot of reclaimed materials from things that I find on the streets. It’s not that I pick everything off the streets. It’s those pieces that speak to me. You feel it. It’s like if somebody loves you. You feel it.”
”So my work represents real people. They have real names. I also believe they breathe. I believe they have scars. That’s why, however it comes out, I don’t complain. I’m an artist who embraces cracks in my work, who embraces the way it comes out. I don’t have any mistakes in my work because I believe they’re human beings. I believe that they speak. They all hold the purpose of somebody. They represent a clan member. They are my queer people.”
Babirye was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She studied art at Makerere University in Kampala (2007–2010) and participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (2015). In 2018, the artist was granted asylum in the US and presented her first solo show at Gordon Robichaux, New York. Wallpaper recently listed her as one of 50 America’s top creatives.
Leilah Babirye’s multidisciplinary practice transforms everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights. The artist fled her native Uganda to New York in 2015 after being publicly outed in a local newspaper. In spring 2018, Babirye was granted asylum with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.
”Right now, America is going to become Africa. I’m from Africa, where we have presidents for 50 years. It’s a bitter truth to talk about, but it’s the truth.”
Composed of debris collected from the streets of New York, Babirye’s sculptures are woven, whittled, welded, burned and burnished. Her choice to use discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is ‘abasiyazi’, meaning sugarcane husk. “It’s rubbish,” explains Babirye, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.” The artist also frequently uses traditional African masks to explore the diversity of LGBTQI identities, assembling them from ceramics, metal and hand-carved wood; lustrous, painterly glazes are juxtaposed with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. In a similar vein, Babirye creates loosely rendered portraits in vivid colours of members from her
community.
Describing her practice, Babirye explains: “Through the act of burning, nailing and assembling, I aim to address the realities of being gay in the context of Uganda and Africa in general. Recently, my working process has been fuelled by a need to find a language to respond to the recent passing of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda.”
In 2024, Babirye’s debut solo museum exhibition in the United Kingdom was held at the Chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibiting a new body of work she made during a residency at the park in the summer a year before. Following shortly in the spring, Babirye presented five major sculptures at the Venice Biennale for the 60th International Art Exhibition titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
In recent years, Babirye has exhibited in group shows at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitworth, Manchester, UK; Hayward Gallery, London, UK; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York and The Aldrich, Ridgefield, Connecticut. She created a site-responsive work for ‘Black Atlantic’, a Public Art Fund project at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, which opened in May 2022.
Her work can be found in public collections including The Africa Centre, London, UK; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, UK; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Leilah Babirye was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in May 2025. The conversation took place at Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin in connection with the opening of Babirye’s exhibition Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque).
Camera: Olivia Newport
Edited by: Nanna Rebekka
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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