‘People only know where one country ends and another begins because people have said it is so. The land doesn't know. The land probably doesn't care. Words kill’. Promised Lands is a fragmentary, essayistic meditation on art, fact, fiction, memory, rights to land, place and displacement. The film marks the culmination of a substantial body of work collectively entitled Uganda in Black and White (2011-2014), and features three voices - the artist, her uncle Patrick Wanambwa and Theodor Hertzka, a 19th century Austro-Hungarian economist, who was one of many Europeans who tried to establish a utopian settlement (‘Freeland’) in East Africa. It also makes reference to the thousands of European refugees who found sanctuary in Africa during World War II and to the violent ongoing realities of internal and external displacement. In reflecting on the relationships between representation, power, projection and possession, the artist’s own role is called into question.

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Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa is an artist and scholar. Born in Glasgow, she now lives and works in London. She is currently Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Bergen in Norway and Convener of the Africa Cluster of the Another Roadmap School — an association of scholars and practitioners of art education currently active in twenty-two cities on four continents. Emma’s recent exhibitions include: Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick), Au-delà des Apparences (Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie, Toulouse), SITUATIONS/Closure (Fotomuseum Winterthur), Many voices, all of them loved (John Hansard Gallery, Southampton), Collective, Edinburgh and Bergen Assembly, 62nd BFI London Film Festival, The Showroom Gallery in London, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2018), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Makerere University Art Gallery and Kunsthalle Bremen. Her essay, ‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African’ was published last year in The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).