COMMON GROUND: OFFERINGS OF RESISTANCE

23.11.2022 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Maaza Mengiste, Tuli Mekondjo

Moderation: Paz Guevara

The conversation series Common Ground focuses on interfaces and brings the commonalities, points of friction, and translation challenges associated with different perspectives and artistic positions into a constructive dialogue. This issue brings together artist Tuli Mekondjo and writer and photographer Maaza Mengiste. In both artistic practices, dealing with photographs from colonial contexts plays a central role. How can these images be viewed today? What do they tell and whose perspective do they elide? What potential do photographic images offer for reconstructing lost knowledge?

The majority of Tuli Mekondjo’s work incorporates photographs from public and personal archives that document both Namibia’s colonial history and its independence war. Regarding colonial ethnographic photographs, the artist has frequently been interested in the loss of Aawambo Kwanyama oral histories and cultural practices, ranging from initiation rituals to bodily adornment practices such as hairstyles. She is deeply concerned with reconstructing, claiming, and honoring black subjectivities in the past. Through the archive, the ancestors become accessible in the present. In particular, Tuli Mekondjo manifests the experiences of women and children whose stories have often been overlooked—especially in prevailing masculinist and patriotic histories of the independence war.

Maaza Mengiste’s works also deal with the afterlife of colonialism. Her most recent novel, The Shadow King, tells the story of Ethiopian resistance to the invasion of Benito Mussolini’s army in 1935. During a year of research spent in Italy, she went through archives, interviewed descendants of Italian soldiers, and collected photographs, diaries, and objects from the period at various flea markets. These materials also served as the basis for Project 3541, a memory project initiated by Mengiste that draws on written, visual, and oral traditions to shed light on the global and personal consequences of the Italo-Ethiopian War.

Conversation in English

Free admission

daadgalerie

Image: Tuli Mekondjo, Courtesy of the artist and Guns and Rain Gallery