Art’s A Wrap

Public art enlivened streets, the country’s foremost feminists watched over Nelson Mandela Avenue and local artists took Namibian art to the world, amid this year’s striving visual arts calendar.

As OMDis Town Transform Agency debuted large-scale murals and sculptures at Oranjemund, which also hosted the bounty of the Bogenfels Artists’ Retreat, the ENK Institute for Public Art’s Windhoek Mural Project coloured the capital.

Activist in Equal Namibia’s LGBTQI+ rainbow sidewalk newly painted outside The Brewers Market in Windhoek and in Hildegard Titus’ Sister Namibia billboard celebration of feminist activists, this year, public art was as sobering as Ruusa Luvindao’s suicide awareness poster project and as breezy as Veruschka Garises’ ‘Happiness Comes from Within’ mural. Both were part of the National Theatre of Namibia and Goethe-Institut Namibia’s Otjomuise Live Arts Festival.

Soaring beyond borders, artists Imke Rust, Rudolf Seibeb, Desiree !Nanuses, Vitjitua Ndjiharine and Hage Mukwendje each excelled in their respective visual arts scholarships, honours, fellowships and residencies.

Rust was awarded the World Heritage Scholarship and connected Twyfelfontein with the farmhouses of Hälsingland in Sweden, while Seibeb was honoured to consider World Press Freedom Day by the German Newspaper Publishers and Digital Publishers Association. !Nanuses earned the esteemed Chester Dale Fellowship at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ndjiharine and Mukwendje were this year’s Namibian visual artists in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, where they mined personal and German colonial archives to construct new narratives pertaining to Namibia and Germany’s shared history. Mukwendje was also a featured artist at the LEAD Innovation Challenge grand finale.

Here at home, top honours went to Saima Iita, whose formidable fire-burnt metal sculpture titled ‘Women Feelings in the 20th Century’ won this year’s prestigious Bank Windhoek Triennial at the National Art Gallery of Namibia.

Zooming in on the city’s galleries, this year’s picture was a collage of eclectic offerings which kicked off with the sexual and gender-based violence-heavy Unam graduate exhibition, and ended with the consummate ‘The Zambians Are Coming’. The NAGN also hosted a pop-up exhibition by South Africa’s fumage fine artist Azael Langa, a Namibia Heritage Week pop-up fashion exhibition and the sprawling #WhatsYourStory? showcase.

At The Project Room, artists were engaged in a 
similar reflection in ‘In the Meantime’, the last exhibition after a series of pandemic-mandated stops and starts, following Francois de Necker’s ‘Recollections in Colour’, Jo Rogge’s ‘Normal NOT Normal’, Trianus Nakale’s ‘Speak Out’, Mitchell Gatsi’s ‘Em’Brace’ and the Decolonising Space Group’s ‘Crossing the B1’, which awarded Tia Elago-Oretu Kaumunika the first prize in its Re//Think competition.

At Café Prestige’s revolving gallery wall as curated by EFANO EFANO, a modest collection of utopian illustrations defined Quigo’s solo debut and #LoveIsLove captured the beauty and diversity of queer Namibian love early in June, before featuring prints by the late Bewise Tjonga earlier this month.

This year featured a mix of recurring exhibitions at the Namibia Craft Centre’s ‘Christmas in July’, alongside the quirky offerings of The Red Shelf’s ‘Old Vogue, New Tricks’ and Tamsin Borwa’s ‘My Family Affair’.

Highlights included Ekipa Jewellery and Art celebrating 20 years of business and the launch of the Namibia Craft Shop.

This year the College of the Arts marked its 50th anniversary, while Emmanuel Enkara’s Definition: Art brought the formerly elitist auction to the people, and StArt Art Gallery continued in its wealth of feminist, archiving and illuminating exhibitions and collaborations exemplified by ‘We Know it in Our Bones’ with Sister Namibia.

A year marred by the death of celebrated painter Paul Kiddo in April, the arts calendar drew to a close with a bittersweet remembrance of young Tjonga, and some inspired distillation of the pandemic’s new normal.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com