Artists Tell Covid-19 Stories at Art Gallery

IN the National Art Gallery of Namibia’s upper gallery a gang of meerkats are the wooden embodiment of artist Dechrin Simasiku Nalishuwa’s family.

Before Covid-19, Nalishuwa would sell the meerkats to tourists at Post Street Mall, but the pandemic’s effect on tourism has seen his clientele all but disappear.

Nalishuwa tells his tale in #WhatsYourStory?, a sprawling group exhibition featuring 82 artists who have received funding and materials to create pieces reflecting on the pandemic.

“This meerkat community represents my family and the community I live in,” says Nalishuwa.

“It shows how we were all shocked. Some suffered loss in some form or the other, and others became enemies of one another to survive.”

Narrating the varied and vivid experiences of artists, #WhatsYourStory? considers the contemporary.

The sanitising at the gallery door is mirrored in numerous pieces, such as Elisia Nghidishange’s large-scale White Corona sculpture of a hand carrying the virus, which speaks to Midrix Sinvula Thubazumbe’s big, beaded sanitiser bottle urging society to sanitise regularly to curb the spread of Covid-19.

Sometimes cautionary, other times ruminating on the nature of the new normal, #WhatsYourStory mines the Covid-19 experience through various mediums.

In street photographer Vilho Nuumbala’s Ghost Town, Windhoek’s eerily abandoned Independence Avenue is described as a space where “only machines and lights remain”.

Feelings of depression are seen in artist Ngaturikarere Murangi’s foetal figure at the centre of Isolation, and heavier themes continue in work by Vaughn Bernard Riekert, who reflects on the lives lost as well as the impact Covid-19 has had on family life and relationships in somber water colours.

“Being in lockdown, not able to socialise and continue with activities as usual, we were forced into introspection,” he says.

Featuring stories about how artist Kim Kabelo Modise, frustrated in lockdown, shaved his head and had to reconsider the source of his strength, as well as Michelle Isaak’s Lockdown Munchies, which depicts our urge to “eat several times just to

suppress negative emotions or to fill the void”, #WhatsYourStory? witnesses the individual and collective experience of Covid-19.

“It is quite challenging to have to wait patiently in queues under the sun to be tested for the Covid-19 virus,” says artist Tity Tshilumba of the collective experience of social distancing he illustrates in a piece titled Circle of Thought.

“While standing in the queue on the marked circle, you only think about yourself to be safe. You feel obliged to stay away from the person in front of and behind you to protect everyone from being infected.

With art presented as therapy through murals by Petrina Matthews and Frans Uunona, the exhibition also features more complex ruminations on what Joseph Madisia calls the Covid-19 Tsunami.

“The pandemic is also a stark reminder of our dysfunctional relationship with nature, and reminds one of the powers of tsunamis, earthquakes and the eruption of new diseases as nature’s defence against human destruction,” he says.

Mirroring our ever-present and essential masks in five spray paintings by Vezembouua Ndukireepo, in Lok Kandjengo’s Who’s Behind the Mask, and Hage Mukwendje’s Superheroes, featuring children in informal settlements using plastic

bags as face coverings, the exhibition regards Covid-19 in its various facets and ripple effects.

“I view the lockdown as a blessing because it gave me the opportunity to create more art and to develop to yet another level,” says artist Rudolf Seibeb in a rare positive piece.

An interesting chronicle of our uncertainty by Kevin Kakori, our sense of imprisonment by Trianus Nakale as well as the corruption exacerbating the situation by artists Fillow Nghipandulwa and Wayne Andy Goliath, the exhibition was opened

by the minister of health and social services Kalumbi Shangula on 9 February, and will run at the National Art Gallery of Namibia until 27 March.

-martha@namibian.com.na ; Martha Mukaiwa on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; marthamukaiwa.com

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