NAGN shines light into past existences with Artefacts exhibition

Entertainment Reporter

THE Artistic Research Communal Knowledge: Reconnecting with Returned Cultural Belongs exhibition featuring 23 Namibian artefacts from the years 1884 to 1990 is a conduit to the past, a collection of poetry, photography, and artefacts that tussles to resuscitate identities of a people whose cultures were diluted by the yoke of colonialism.

 The exhibition, which opened this past week, addresses and redresses silences and gaps in Namibia’s historiography and cultural heritage resulting from the colonization of the country by the German Empire (1884-1915) and South Africa (1915-1990).

Ndapewoshali Ndahafa Ilunga, director of the Museums Association of Namibia, explained that the Artistic Research Communal Knowledge: Reconnecting with Returned Cultural exhibition, co-funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, is a sub-project of the larger Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures projects. The project contracted six artists, namely, Betty Katuua, Keith Vries, Nesindano Namises, Prince Marenga, Vitjitua Ndjiharine, who also worked closely with researchers.

 The artists used the historical studies knowledge and represented it in their different artistic mediums. 

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, a Professor of the Arts at the University of Namibia, explained that the work of restitution avails opportunities for artists and cultural workers to critically and creatively engage as it should be. “Here I speak as one of those artists who have been privileged to participate in residences, museums, universities, festivals, and conferences, predominantly, in Europe. On the one hand, this has exposed me to the international markets, opening my practice to the world in very generative ways. However, I am also attentive to how these opportunities have used us, African artists, from the global south to do the dirty laundry of European Museums. And here I use the term dirty laundry carefully because if you are in the heritage sector, one of the biggest critiques of museums, particularly museums with colonial heritage, is that they are crime scenes. That they have blood on their hands, if you think of human remains, and even these objects that brought us here today. How they got to Europe, why they need to be restituted. There was some kind of crime that had to have happened. That dirty laundry in this age, where museums are recognizing that, we need to bring in the communities, we need to bring in the cultural workers, it so happens that often, we cultural workers have to do the laundry. The laundry is everyone’s business. We are made to do the affective labour and museums are only there to tick boxes off, to say they have done the decolonial work,” Mushaandja said.

The artist further questioned when Namibia will begin to fund its own decolonial work.”