About Benjamin Ibanda
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Ibanda was born in 1998 in Kampala, Uganda. He is a Dubai-based contemporary artist whose practice spans painting, live performance, and large-scale object commissions. He holds a UAE Golden Visa as a recognised artist.
He began drawing at the age of five or six, initially in friendly competition with his elder brother, both of them filling whatever paper they could find. That early habit of looking, copying, and inventing never left him. His father, a photographer and prolific draughtsman, kept their home filled with black-ink drawings of human figures, animals, and scenes from daily life. Growing up inside that environment taught Ibanda, long before he understood art as a profession, that a single line made with intention carries more weight than a page covered without thought.
In 2015, while still in secondary school, Ibanda entered the DStv Eutelsat Star Awards, a continental creative competition spanning Africa. He placed first in Uganda and second across the continent. The recognition was formative, confirming that the work he was making in Kampala had reach beyond it.
He went on to pursue a career in finance, eventually joining the Central Bank of Uganda. The discipline of that environment, its precision and its demand for rigour, shaped him in ways that are still visible in how he approaches a commission. He left the Bank and moved to Dubai in 2022.
Dubai was not a default. Ibanda chose it as a city that rewards ambition and does not ask for institutional credentials before taking you seriously. From that base, he began placing his work into contexts it had rarely occupied.
In 2023, he presented his work publicly in Dubai for the first time, at the Dubai International Horse Fair, where it was seen by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai. That same year brought collaborations with Etihad Airways and De Bethune, and participation in Art Basel Miami Beach.
In 2024, he painted live at the Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in December, and completed commissions with Mercedes-Benz and W Hotels. A live performance at the Grand Prix generated tens of millions of views across digital platforms.
The visual language running through all of this work is what Ibanda calls Afro-doodle: a dense, wave-like system of lines and circular forms drawn from African weaving traditions, basket geometries, and communal objects. The circle functions in his compositions as structure rather than ornament, a reference to cycles, shared history, and continuity. The line systems were partly shaped by ideas he encountered in Masaru Emoto's The Hidden Messages in Water (2001), in particular the notion that water does not resist its environment but absorbs and reorganises itself within it. For Ibanda, that became a way of thinking about how a visual tradition moves across time and context without losing what it carries.
His work has been presented internationally and is held in private collections across the Gulf and beyond. His practice continues to develop at the intersection of fine art, live performance, and luxury commissions.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I started drawing because my brother was drawing. It was as simple as that. We sat across from each other and competed over paper. I have no idea who won. But something got fixed in me then, the need to make a mark and then make a better one.
My father was a photographer. He also drew, constantly, in black ink on white paper: people, animals, ordinary things observed carefully. I did not study what he made, I just grew up inside it. That is probably why line is still where I begin. Not colour, not concept. Line first.
The patterns in my work come from African visual traditions: the geometry of woven baskets, hats, objects that are made by hand and passed between people. Circular forms appear throughout my compositions because they carry meaning that does not need explanation. They speak to continuity, to what is handed down, to the idea that things connect rather than stop. Alongside these are dense, flowing line systems that move across surfaces the way water moves across terrain, finding the path that is available, adapting without losing direction. I encountered that idea in Masaru Emoto's The Hidden Messages in Water (2001) and it changed how I thought about what a line is doing. It is not describing something. It is responding to something.
I left the Central Bank of Uganda and moved to Dubai in 2022. That decision was not impulsive. I had watched what was possible from where I was, and I had decided I wanted more room. Dubai gave me that. It is a city full of people who built something somewhere else and then built something different here. That suited me.
I work across mediums because the work asks for different things at different times. Canvas when I need to sit with a piece and let it develop slowly. Vehicles and large-scale objects when the work needs to be made live, in front of people, with no possibility of revision. Digital when I want to build something that did not exist before I opened the file. The Afro-doodle language stays consistent across all of them, the geometry, the circular forms, the dense line systems but the surface and the conditions change depending on what the commission or the idea requires.
I draw live, in real time, on objects designed for speed and precision. Supercars, aviation platforms, the walls of hotels and fair pavilions. The work is created once, in front of people, with no possibility of correction. That is deliberate. The irreversibility is part of what the work is about. It creates a record of a moment, of trust between me and whoever commissioned the piece, of presence in a specific place at a specific time. The pattern carries all of that with it, wherever the object goes.
I place African visual culture in spaces where it has not usually been placed. Not because those spaces need it, but because the work belongs anywhere it is strong enough to hold. It has been strong enough so far.
What I am working toward is a body of work where the heritage and the contemporary are indistinguishable from each other. Where you cannot point to the influence and separate it from the invention. That is when the work becomes its own thing entirely. I am not there yet, but I am closer with every commission.
WHY THIS WORK MATTERS NOW AND NEXT
The conversation around contemporary African art has shifted considerably over the past decade. What was once treated as peripheral is now understood as central, and collectors, institutions, and major brands are engaging with African-rooted practices with a seriousness that was not there before. Ibanda's work is positioned at the front of that shift, not as a response to it.
What distinguishes his practice is not simply its visual identity, though that is strong and coherent. It is the range of contexts in which the work functions without compromise. A painting made live at a Grand Prix and a work presented at Art Basel Miami Beach are the same practice, carried by the same convictions, legible to very different audiences. That range is rare.
As the Gulf continues to develop as a serious market for contemporary art, and as collectors globally look for work that is grounded in specific cultural knowledge rather than generalist internationalism, Ibanda's position becomes more rather than less significant. His base in Dubai, his relationships with major luxury partners, and his track record of live commissions at high-visibility events give him a profile that functions across commercial, institutional, and collector contexts simultaneously.
The work is not finished. It is in motion. And the direction it is moving in is worth watching.