One Door. Six Institutions. One Question: Who Gets In?

MERIT-BASED ENTRY: A new sculptural and photographic series by Jonah Batambuze explores the invisible systems that shape access, merit, and belonging.

Photo Credit: Members Only from MERIT-BASED ENTRY (2026) by Jonah Batambuze

PETERBOROUGH, UK (11 August 2026) — A reclaimed domestic door appears at a golf course. Next, it stands at the entrance to a university. Then outside a workplace, a basketball court, and private housing.

Beginning August 11, Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist Jonah Batambuze will release one photograph each week from MERIT-BASED ENTRY (2026), an ongoing sculptural and photographic series exploring the often invisible systems that determine who is welcomed, questioned, or turned away.

At a moment when merit is increasingly invoked as a measure of who deserves opportunity, MERIT-BASED ENTRY asks a more fundamental question: who gets to define merit in the first place?

Across each site, the door never changes. Only the institution surrounding it does.

The resulting works are titled Members Only, Whose Curriculum?, ID Please, Who You Know?, You Live Here? and American Dreamin’. Rather than describing the locations, the titles point to the unwritten rules each institution asks us to learn.

At the centre of the project is a reclaimed domestic door with its original obscure-textured glass, allowing viewers to glimpse beyond it without ever fully revealing what lies on the other side. An engraved plaque reads: MERIT-BASED ENTRY.

“I started thinking about the door as a piece of architecture that carries an instruction. It doesn’t just separate one space from another. It asks whether you qualify to cross the threshold,” said Batambuze.

Created through a series of site-based installations across Peterborough, the project ultimately mirrored its own central question. While photographing the work, Batambuze found himself watched by passersby and even photographed by an observer who recorded his license plate—an encounter that echoed the project’s central theme by revealing how surveillance, judgment, and assumptions about who belongs extend beyond institutions into everyday life.

Rather than releasing the work all at once, MERIT-BASED ENTRY unfolds over time. One new image will be published weekly on Batambuze’s website and Instagram, inviting viewers to consider each institutional setting individually before the series reveals its broader commentary on access, qualification, and belonging.

MERIT-BASED ENTRY is the latest work developed through Reconstruction Studies, Batambuze’s artistic methodology examining how history, power, and knowledge are transmitted through objects, bureaucracies, bodies, and everyday life.

For interview requests, high-resolution images, or additional information, visit www.jonahbatambuze.com or contact Jacqueline Lara at JacquelineL@mpactpr.com.

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About Jonah Batambuze

Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, moving image, writing, and archival research. His practice examines how history, institutions, and systems of power are inherited and reconstructed through everyday objects, archives, bureaucracies, and public space. Central to his work is Reconstruction Studies, an artistic methodology developed in response to the limitations of institutional archives that understands history as distributed across objects, bodies, gestures, landscapes, bureaucracies, and everyday life.

Batambuze is the founding director of BlindianProject, a living archive exploring Black × Brown histories and diasporic memory. His work has been exhibited across Europe and North America, including new sculptural installations presented during Art Basel 2025.