Tuli Mekondjo‘s art performance „Ousie Martha“

The Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo reflects in this conversation
about her work in the colonial image archives of the Basler Afrika
Bibliographien and how this led her to initiate new artistic
practices and conceptualise and design a new art performance.
«Ousie Martha» references generations of African laundry women in
Namibia as wage labourers in white settler homes, often depicted in
settler family photography. Inventing an outdoor print technique
with copies of one particular photograph of a laundry woman in
Okahandja in 1953 from the BAB photo archives, Tuli Mekondjo
produced embroided «lappies« (rags) and choreographed a laundry
woman’s performance of Self at the BAB in April 2023. In this
extract from a conversation with BAB curators, Tuli Mekondjo
explains the genesis of her latest work and why she wanted to have
the premiere of her performance to be staged at the archives in
Switzerland. «I wanted to engage with the ancestral voices by
responding, singing with them, mimicking their acts of labouring
while they sang. I wanted to bring Ousie Martha into that space,
but to do the laundry for her.” As she told The Namibian newspaper
after the Basel performance: “In Switzerland, Germany and Europe in
general, they need to be reminded of the horrors of colonialism and
the traumas they inflicted” (10 May 2023)