Exploring land as home, activism, and witness in post-colonial Namibia.
Curatorial Role: Curator, NAGN
Exhibition Type: Collection Exhibition | NAGN & GRN Permanent Collections
This collection exhibition consists of artworks in paintings, photographs and sculptures from the National Art Gallery of Namibia Permanent Collection, Government of the Republic of Namibia Permanent Collection in collaboration with contemporary artists. The exhibition aims to explore the current characteristic of landscape art in Namibia, land as home, land as activism and land as witness. LANDSCAPE is tracing its innovation throughout history by highlighting the aesthetic quality, and expressive power of the individual works that depict various landscapes as subject and seek to open viewer’s mind to a vantage point of the past in comparison to the present.
Featured Artists: Frans Nambinga, David Amukoto, Petrus Amuthenu, Nicola Brandt, Amy Schoeman, Barbara Pirron, John Liebenberg, Ndasuunje ‘Papa’ Shikongeni, Isamael Shivute, Anita Steyn, Vilho Nuumbala, Hanne Marrott-Alpers, Helga Khol, Paul Kiddo, Jurgen Katambo, Erich Mayer, Barbara BÖhlke, Alfeus Mateus, Shawn van Eeden, Kaleb Haipinge, Libbolius Nekundi, Martine Masson, David Indongo, Christian Goltz, Nicolaas Maritz, Edson Nicolai, Gerrit van Schouwenberg, Shiya Kharuseb and Tony Figueira.
LANDSCAPE’s allure respites artists through their engagement of artworks to decolonize art by placing pre-colonial thought and colonial works in dialogue with post-colonial thought, practice and interpretation that seek to unsettle settler colonialism.
“History is not in the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history”.
James Baldwin, I am not your Negro, 2006
LANDSCAPES present a fundamental opportunity to pose questions about subject matter in order to unsettle existing interpretations and meanings about them and then to find ways how decolonial narratives may be implemented in non-western art scholarship. Therefor Landscape as Home is re-viewing, re-identifying, self-naming as opposed to being labelled and for rewriting history of art that integrates non-Western and Indigenous knowledge systems of art, architecture, design, storytelling, skills, philosophies and competencies developed by societies with long histories of interaction with natural surroundings which inform decision-making about fundamental aspects of day-to-day life in a non-western context.
Therefore in a space of 10 years, both contemporary artists exploring and engaging Land as a Home, a reflective tool we will utilise through public programming and education to determine progress and social transformation between (Shanti Town by Shiya Kharusebs’) 2004 and (Frans Nambinga’s Vandaliser) 2013. A present-day national challenge is ownership of land and the economic difficulties documented by artists of immediate surroundings and environment.
Intellectually, LANDSCAPES highlights the value of intensity originating from communities and the local oral tradition of disseminating knowledge in raising a wide range of new voices. This humanizing exhibitionary ethos is important to positively revalue the cultural traditions and present a counter view to the widespread notions of famine and ‘primitive otherness’ that continue to be perpetuated in the media and which has such a detrimental effect (Gilborn 1995).
Henceforth, ‘we look through the objects that circulate in our lives, to see what they disclose about history, society, nature or culture – above all, what they disclose about us,’ Bill Brown, Thing Theory 2001.
Desiree D !Nanuses
NAGN Curator