Leilah Babirye Builds a World of Queer Kinship and Celebration
by Oluchi Onyekwusi Jun 10, 2026
In her latest exhibition, The Architecture of Belonging, Leilah Babirye continues her powerful exploration of identity, resilience, and queer belonging—this time placing joy and celebration at the centre of the narrative.
Presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the exhibition unfolds as an imagined queer wedding. Within this constructed ceremonial space, brides, grooms, attendants, guardians, and community members appear together in a collective act of affirmation. Rather than a single event, the installation becomes a symbolic gathering where belonging is actively created, shared, and sustained.
Across the gallery, Babirye’s sculptural language takes on both monumental and intimate forms. Towering carved heads preside over the space, while smaller figures cluster around them, suggesting protection, care, and interdependence. Together, they form a kind of emotional and social architecture—one built not from permanence, but from connection.
Babirye is internationally recognised for transforming discarded and found materials into striking figurative sculptures. Chains, bicycle parts, rubber tyres, and other salvaged objects are reassembled into portraits that resemble ceremonial figures adorned with crowns, jewellery, and symbolic embellishments. These materials carry traces of abandonment and reuse, yet in her hands they become markers of dignity, transformation, and presence
Her practice is deeply shaped by personal history. After being publicly outed as gay in Uganda—a country where same-sex relationships are criminalised—Babirye left her home country and eventually settled in the United States. Themes of exile, exclusion, survival, and self-making run throughout her work, not as abstract concepts, but as lived realities translated into sculptural form
In The Architecture of Belonging, the wedding motif becomes especially significant. Weddings are often associated with recognition, legitimacy, and social acceptance. By reimagining this ritual through a queer lens, Babirye both reclaims and expands its meaning, positioning it as a space where marginalised identities are not only acknowledged but celebrated.
Beyond its symbolic framework, the exhibition also speaks to broader questions of community and chosen family. In many queer contexts, belonging is not inherited but intentionally built through relationships, care, and shared experience. Babirye captures this dynamic through sculptural assemblies that feel both deeply personal and collectively powerful.
Ultimately, The Architecture of Belonging resists singular interpretations. Instead, it offers a space where identity is held as something fluid and relational constructed through memory, survival, and the ongoing act of coming together.
The exhibition remains on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston through 18 January 2027.
