text: Paul Ndema’s work focuses on the contradictions and hypocrisy of day-to-day life. Through Ndema’s celebratory paintings, contradiction becomes a kind of syncretism, a way of coping with accelerating change in our daily lives as modernity cracks through the past and splinters into colour.
  As they wink and smile at the viewer, an African guard dressed in the traditional Pontifical Swiss Guard uniform, salutes an African cardinal. Behind that wink and smile lies a deep uncertainty that the next Pope or Pontifical Swiss Guard will be African.
  Ndema studied at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University from 1999-2002 where he obtained his bachelors in fine arts. He has participated in the Modern and Contemporary Art Auction, 2014, the Kampala Art Biennale, 2014, and his work is in many private collections including the Sindika Dokolo collection, Angola.