INTRODUCTION
The traces of our lives are made up of memories that connect us to the source.
“[W]Here Now” reflects on the role of water as a conduit to the essence of our lives. This water constantly flows to map the pathways of our identities and remind us that we all come from somewhere.
Water is a vessel and connection to the source of all life that carries our stories, histories, and power. But where do we go to remember? And how do we know the importance of the importance of things we are re-membering? Because not all memories come from us, but a collective and generational pool of experience.
Our exhibition space becomes this site of memory where we conjure up what is already in us to better understand our place in the world.
Like Toni Morrison puts it –– all water has perfect memory and etched within us all are rivers, lakes, and seas that are trying to get back where they were – The source.
Just like water our artists are mapping out and activating different memories through creating. Neither time nor centuries of oppression have been, and can erase Africans’ true heritage. We’ll always find a way.
DATES: 11 - 17 June OPEN DAILY: 10 - 6PM
“[W]Here Now” reflects on the role of water as a conduit to the essence of our lives. This water constantly flows to map the pathways of our identities and remind us that we all come from somewhere.
Water is a vessel and connection to the source of all life that carries our stories, histories, and power. But where do we go to remember? And how do we know the importance of the importance of things we are re-membering? Because not all memories come from us, but a collective and generational pool of experience.
Our exhibition space becomes this site of memory where we conjure up what is already in us to better understand our place in the world.
Like Toni Morrison puts it –– all water has perfect memory and etched within us all are rivers, lakes, and seas that are trying to get back where they were – The source.
Just like water our artists are mapping out and activating different memories through creating. Neither time nor centuries of oppression have been, and can erase Africans’ true heritage. We’ll always find a way.
DATES: 11 - 17 June OPEN DAILY: 10 - 6PM
MARKETPLACE
TULI MEKONDJO
Tuli Mekondjo is a self-taught Namibian artist whose work explores the construction of identity in the shadow of Namibia’s violent past as both a German and later South African colony.
Drawing on her ongoing research into pre-colonial Aawambo fertility dolls, Mekondjo carries a doll on her back as a way to honour her ancestors and to reflect on both communal and personal loss experienced during her lifetime and the preceding decades: “This doll is an embodiment of every single ancestor, every single relative that I never met.”
The histories of Namibian cultural and ethnographic objects -many of which are now housed in European museums – come under scrutiny in Mekondjo’s performance.
The exhibition will showcase a video of Tuli’s performance piece ‘Ousie Martha’ 2023/24.
Drawing on 1950s images from Namibia found in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien archive in Switzerland, Ousie Martha was presented in 2023 in both Basel and Berlin.
In this work documented in Basel and South Africa, the artist channels the spirits of Namibian women who laboured as domestic workers during the colonial and apartheid eras. Mekondjo symbolically steps into the role of Martha...
* Tuli Mekodjo’s work is showcased, courtesy of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien Switzerland and, Guns and Rain Gallery South Africa.
