Kampala — KAMPALA is now a hub for visual arts. Almost every month, it hosts an art exhibition. Great works of art, the result of skilled hands, lofty ideas and exorbitant price tags have, thus, become the face of modern art in Uganda.

However, much of this decorative work ends up in the posh living rooms of Kampala's elite and rich art collectors, in the corridors of plush hotels and on walls of shopping malls and offices. Such is the impact of elitism and commercialism on Uganda's visual arts, the discipline hardly reflects our social and emotional values.

In an initiative to explore these values, Plan Uganda, a children centered development organisation last week organised an art exhibition at the Grand Imperial Hotel, Kampala

The exhibition featured paintings by local communities and students from Tororo district whom the organisation in collaboration with American artist Hilary Wallis and Ugandan artist Justin Igala, spent two months training in basic artistic skills.

The exhibition, part of Plan Uganda's initiative to establish cultural and therapeutic programmes in Tororo, featured youth and HIV health centre patients, members and individuals from Nyalakot, Kwapa and Mukuju post-test clubs and Senior Three art students from Tororo Girls School.

The paintings captured moving stories of life through the eyes of some of Uganda's uneducated and most disadvantaged communities. Simple caricatures and naïve images of graveyard-filled households, poverty stricken people, orphaned children, abused mothers and young tormented schoolgirls resisting male advances depict these people's innermost feelings.

Most paintings were done on simple paper in raw and coloured pencil.

A painting by Immaculate Athieno, a member of Mukuju outpatient home shows a man carrying food from the market to his mistresses, while his hungry wife and children languish in a corner. "I am the woman in the corner... he has forgotten about me and my children," she says of her adulterous and abusive husband.

Even though the message in her painting is sad, Athieno is glad she shared it. No one felt as triumphant as Edward Rotta, a 58-year-old visually-impaired man, whose painting depicting a fish and a hen was the highlight of the exhibition.

Rotta, a poor peasant from Nyalakot surprised even himself when he, with assistance from Hillary, sketched this image in bright orange and brown colours.

"I am happy I have finally expressed myself... Fish and chicken are nutritious... even sick people need them," he said.

For the students, the exhibition was an opportunity to explore raw artistic abilities and to express feelings about AIDS, relationships and education. They painted a mural depicting imaginative images of a pregnant schoolgirl carrying a suitcase, one resisting a gift from a man and another brandishing a report card. For the public, this exhibition was an eye opener. Each painting cost sh20,000.