Namibian Landscapes – Dreamy And Dire

In ‘Landscape’, a group exhibition currently on display at the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN), space is spiritual, memorial, industrialised and contested.

Presenting a collection of paintings, photographs and sculptures from the national gallery and the Republic of Namibia’s permanent collections in collaboration with contemporary artists, the exhibition features work examining local landscapes as timeless witnesses, areas of activism, sites of history and as home.

Mesmeric and a thing of tourist attraction in the rich, burnt-orange dunes graduating into contrasting purple hills in Christian Goltz’s ‘Roter Komma’ and frank in Ismael Shivute’s mixed media ‘Kilimanjaro Location’, which builds the landscape of the sprawling informal settlement from its detritus of cans, odds, ends and ash, the exhibition alternates between the dreamy and the dire.

Zooming in on landscapes interrupted by memorial crosses, photographer Shawn van Eeden ruminates on Namibia’s plague of road accidents as evidenced by these items of remembrance, while considering the deaths we mark and the ones we largely ignore.

This idea speaks to work by Nicola Brandt, who presents ‘No Monument for the Fallen’, which features an image of Katuvangua Migal Maendo, the great-granddaughter of Petrus Hui, looking out over a landscape alive with the memory of the Ovaherero’s bloody battle against the Germans in 1904.

Sometimes a sacred place for Namibians to remain silent to honour those who were killed, and other times the space in which Vilho Nuumbala photographs a monochrome tree bent almost horizontally by the weight of urban development and industrialisation, in ‘Landscape’, the scenery is historical yet often afflicted by modernity as in Shiya Kharuseb’s mixed media ‘Khoen Ge Hai’ (People Were Here), which recalls Namibia’s emptied homelands in the wake of urban migration.

Abstract, ancient and mysterious in work by Barbara Böhlke, Barbara Pirron and Amy Schoeman and a glimpse into the liberation struggle archives through photography by Tony Figueira and John Liebenberg, ‘Landscape’ draws on the magic of Rosh Pinah as witnessed by Anita Steyn and the nostalgia of rustic homesteads as seen through the eyes of Jurgen Katambo in his mixed media ‘Straight from the Heart’.

An eclectic offering that includes, among others, work by Helga Kohl, Frans Nambinga, Libbolius Nekundi, David Indongo and Papa Ndasuunje Shikongeni, ‘Landscape’ will be on display at the NAGN’s lower gallery until 31 January 2021.

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