Artist Tuli Mekondjo Makes History at Bundestag

Namibian visual artist Tuli Mekondjo has made history as the first Namibian to join the Bundestag’s permanent art collection in Berlin.

Her powerful mixed-media work ‘Kwariri Nyoko Kevako: Echoes of the Matriarchs’ was commissioned to represent article 1 of Germany’s Basic Law – the guarantee of human dignity – and now stands inside the German parliament.

Born in Angola to Namibian freedom fighters and orphaned at a young age, Mekondjo refused a conventional academic path, choosing instead to create and experiment.

Over the years she has become known for weaving natural and unconventional materials – mahangu, soil, silk, resin, embroidery and archival photographs – into layered works that explore identity, trauma and ancestral memory.

Much of her art engages Namibia’s colonial history under Germany and apartheid-era South Africa.

Mekondjo has exhibited widely, from the Dakar Biennale to Frieze London and Art Basel Miami, and in 2022 became the first black Namibian woman to exhibit in the United States.

Currently, ‘Afrotekismo’, her solo video installation, is showing in New York. She is represented by Guns & Rain Gallery in Johannesburg and Hales Gallery in New York.

Julie Taylor, her gallerist at Guns & Rain, describes Mekondjo’s work as an act of remembrance and resistance.

HONOURING THE ANCESTORS

“She is shaping new visual revisionist histories about Namibia, and African societies more broadly, in the context of long struggles over memory and memorialisation.

“Her work is about honouring her ancestors and acknowledging suffering and cultural loss. There is huge grief in her work, but it is also a channel for healing, and everywhere her work is shown, people feel that power and that possibility,” Taylor says.

In May this year, Bundestag president Julia Klöckner and curator Kristina Volke opened ‘Us – 19 Fundamental Rights. 19 Artistic Positions. One Dialogue Space’, an exhibition marking 75 years of Germany’s Basic Law.

Some 19 artists were selected to interpret the constitution’s core rights.

Mekondjo was chosen to represent Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.”

Her nearly four-metre canvas layers superimposed images of Namibian women with embroidered lines tracing colonial railway routes, concentration camps and the “red line”.

Birds soar above the faces, while the beige tones reflect Namibia’s desert.

For Mekondjo, being chosen for article 1 carried profound meaning.

“That article deals with dignity, and I think it’s such a perfect article for my work, because as Namibians we still need to keep questioning: Are we being treated equally by Germany when it comes to negotiations, when we talk about this colonial entanglement?” she asks.

She notes the centrality of Shark Island, the German concentration camp where thousands of Namibians died between 1904 and 1908.

“Every single time they look at it, they should be reminded of the colonial entanglements between Namibia and Germany and the traumas we as Namibians are still suffering.

“We are still seeking dignity. We are still asking to be looked at. They cannot ignore that because at the back of the canvas there’s a whole history about Hendrik Witbooi, about Shark Island, about women, about contract labourers,” she says.

Mekondjo intentionally centres women in her art.

She says their labour and sacrifices under colonialism and apartheid were often erased. Women worked in quarries, cleaned human remains for German race ‘science’, and cared for white families as nannies while neglecting their own.

This, she says, has left deep generational scars.

Her canvas is a tribute to these women, including her mother, a freedom fighter, and a way of confronting the silence around sexual violence in war and within Swapo’s own history.

“So, this canvas really honours our mothers,” she says of the piece, which took a year to complete.

Curator Kristina Volke says the exhibition aims to spark dialogue about democracy and rights through art.

“A universe full of possibilities has been created. A space full of stories and ways of discovering these and comparing them with individual experiences. It is an exhibition about us: who we are and want to be, today and in the future,” she says.

Volke says Mekondjo’s contribution is especially significant.

“Tuli also repeats the concept of ubuntu with her work, which embodies dignity as a communal, collective concept and is juxtaposed with our individual concept of dignity,” she explains.

The exhibition runs until June 2026.

Looking ahead, Mekondjo says she plans to explore the Lubango dungeons in Angola – a dark part of Namibia’s liberation history.

She wants to uncover the stories of Namibians who never returned home, shining light on painful silences.

Her art, she insists, is about memory, justice and truth.

And in Berlin’s Bundestag, her voice – and those of the women she honours – now echoes in the heart of Europe.

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