The Great Hall Exhibitions
Acaye Kerunen: 1246 Days Around the Sun
Opening: November 12 at 6:00 PM
On View: November 12, 2025 – May 22, 2026
Public Program: November 17 at 6:00 PM
Launch exhibition website RSVP for the opening See the exhibition Public Programming
NEW YORK, October 21, 2025 — The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce 1246 Days Around the Sun featuring artist Acaye Kerunen (b. Kampala, Uganda), which continues the Great Hall Exhibition series’ ongoing commitment to showcasing the work of exceptional women artists. Marking the artist’s first solo institutional presentation and her New York debut, 1246 Days Around the Sun offers a powerful perspective on the intellectual and ecological labors of making and the colonial afterlives of gendered space.
Kerunen’s sculptural works are composed of plants from the wetland ecosystems of Nalubaale (Lake Victoria) and the Great Lakes region of East Africa. Four such large scale works will be on view, suspended in the Beaux-Arts interior of the Marica Vilcek Great Hall. To make these works, Kerunen engages the collaborative labor, expertise, and artistry of women’s weaving to transform organic materials into a new sculptural language of relation and care. Her practice engages both the mathematical structures of pattern and architecture and the temporal cycles of growth, harvest, creation, and display.
Kerunen’s art is situated within traditions that highlight “women’s work” as a site of important intergenerational transmission. Her practice is rooted in hand stitching, knotting, weaving, and braiding natural fibers. Such skills have long been devalued under patriarchy, but are in fact a sophisticated language of mathematical sequences made visible in the woven fractals that traverse her sculptures’ surfaces. The exhibition’s featured works—Tong Lengu (Eggs of Beauty) (2024), Pok Lengu (Husks of Beauty) (2024), Poluutingu (The heavens have lifted her up) (2023), and Nyingati (Someone’s Wife) (2023)—are titled in Alur, a language spoken primarily in northwestern Uganda. Together, they articulate what the artist calls the “hidden knowledge of land and ecologies,” creatively dismantling colonial systems of extraction and masculism. Foregrounding diverse inheritances, Kerunen reclaims craft as an act of reverence and resistance.
The artist’s practice centers the environment as both the source of artistic material and a collective repository of wisdom. Her use of obuso (raffia), byayi (banana fiber), mutuba (the bark of which yields olubugo, also known as barkcloth) and ensansa (palm leaves), among other plant-based textiles are informed by the availability of resources and the shifting rhythms of the seasons. Her partnerships across East Africa are shaped by local ecologies—what grows where, when it can be harvested, and whose expertise renders it into form. Kerunen’s attentiveness to the environment complicates romanticized notions of “nature” as pristine or separate from human intervention, instead revealing the Great Lakes ecosystem as a site of entanglement shaped by climate crisis and colonial extraction.
In tandem with the exhibition, the graduate student curators of the exhibition participate in a seminar dedicated to the pressing contemporary issues Kerunen’s work illuminates. In a new collaboration with the Stephen Chan Library of Fine Arts, they will present their research through primary sources and new library acquisitions on view in vitrines across the Institute’s James B. Duke House. These selections will elaborate the exhibition’s intersecting themes, such as Ugandan history, nature-driven textile weaving techniques, and the broader social and political forces that shape artistic production in East Africa. Together, they offer a layered framework for understanding Kerunen’s practice within both local and transnational contexts.
Acaye Kerunen (b. Kampala, Uganda) has a multidisciplinary practice, spanning visual and performance art, sound, film, movement, poetry, curation, activism, and therapy. Her work seeks to disassemble the colonial and patriarchal structures that have long inhibited women’s freedom and artistic expression in East Africa and the Great Lakes region, and she works collaboratively with communities of women across Uganda to produce the handcrafted, woven, and dyed materials in her installations and sculptures. Kerunen was featured in Uganda’s inaugural pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale alongside artist Collin Sekajugo in Radiance – They Dream in Time (2022) and returned to curate the nation’s pavilion for the 60th edition, WAN ACEL|TULIBAMU|TURIBAMWE|WE ARE ONE (2024). Kerunen has had solo presentations at Afriart Gallery, Kampala (2021), RAM Galleri, Oslo (2023), BLUM, Los Angeles (2023), Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna (2024), and Pace, London (2024), and has been featured in group exhibitions at Ars Belga, Brussels (2023), and the Barbican Centre, London (2024). Kerunen is also at work on a musical theatre production, I HAVE A DRUM (IHAD), a drum-driven performance celebrating and documenting Ingoma Nshya, the world-renowned Women Drummers of Rwanda.
This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria NapoleoneXX.
We extend special thanks to the artist, Acaye Kerunen; Georgie Rees, Lily Wetherill, Alycia Gaunt, and Xin Wang of Pace Gallery; Dr. J Jong Lou, Ariell Christian, and Lori Salmon. IFA graduate students Lauren Berling, Sarah Diaz, Elena Evnin, Luis Guevara-Flores, Moe’Neyah Holland, Kaleha Kegode, Josie Lee, and Sacha Reid curated the exhibition. Thanks also to Joan Kee, Catherine Quan Damman, Prita Meier, Sarah Higby, Jason Dubs, Nadia Rivers, Lisa Conte, Matthew Hayes, Ariel Luna Anais and many other IFA faculty and staff for their support. Jason Varone designed the website.
About the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU
Since 1932, The Institute of Fine Arts has been dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in the history of art, archaeology, curation, and conservation. The Great Hall Exhibition was formed as a student-led coalition in 2013 with a focus on presenting contemporary art in the Duke House’s Beaux-Arts interior. Acclaimed artists Lynda Benglis, Rachel Harrison, Elaine Lustig-Cohen, Amy Yao, Lucy Kim, Xaviera Simmons, Cauleen Smith, Maia Ruth Lee, and Rose Salane are among those featured to date.
About ValeriaNapoleoneXX
ValeriaNapoleoneXX is an umbrella platform for projects and initiatives working towards increasing the recognition and validation of art practices by women artists through collaborations and partnerships with institutions and individuals in the world of contemporary art.
About ValeriaNapoleoneXXIFA
ValeriaNapoleoneXXIFA is an ongoing commitment to underwrite the Great Hall Exhibition Series at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, focused on the work of women artists.