Tuli Mekondjo: Adopting the Ancestors You Need

The colonial photographic archive presents a challenge for the Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo: how can she retrieve what she wants from it (a sense of the pre-colonial lifeworld that her great-grandmothers inhabited) without inadvertently reproducing the things she does not (the objectifying and controlling gaze that structures it). Her paintings take archival photographs shot by colonial administrators, missionaries, anthropologists, and commercial photographers that depict Namibian pre-colonial dress, hairstyles, and customs and subsume them within expressive marks, organic forms, and elaborate patterns. These recuperative and reparative gestures mitigate the objectifying qualities of the original photographs and create a space where her adopted ancestors from the photographs can recuperate from their long exile in the archive. Her obsessive reworking of a problematic object (the colonial photograph) transforms it into something capable of nurturing and sustaining a self that is both rooted in an indigenous past and invested in a radical future. Her performances in modern, urban spaces extend this practice of self-fashioning. She wears costumes that recall the unsettling appearance of an ash-bride, a young woman at the final stage of the Kwanyama female coming of age ritual. She reimagines this forgotten figure as an agent of social disruption, female autonomy, and future potentiality. While many contemporary artists engage with the colonial archive with the aim of revealing how the past continues to negatively shape the present, Mekondjo uses it to construct speculative ancestors and future selves that are no longer defined by the catastrophes of the past.