Tuli Mekondjo is an artist from Namimbia, working with image, found objects, sculpture, textile, photography and video. Mekondjo creates delicate yet powerful textile-based artworks and installations within which at times she performs. Her practice discusses the colonial history of Namibia and contours the harsh realities of violence, repression, and loss that continue to affect her homeland’s diverse communities and cultures, be it because of toxicity and pollution, or due to exploitation and plunder. Mekondjo demands the acknowledgment of possible narratives and experiences that were never allowed to occupy the space and place they should. A large part of her practice, calls for the return of doubiously acquired and expropriated cultural objects and traditions, but also demands access of persons, artists, researchers towards these objects that they have a direct lineage to, or to archives that discuss colonial times of the region, addressing the gatekeeping that exists to this day in the Western museum.

In this light, the new commission from Kunsthalle Bern comes to discuss the artist’s research on “constructed children” what in Western ethnography is called fertility dolls. These works on show reflect upon the power structures that were introduced to Namibia under colonial rule and the effect they had for cultural objects that were part of daily life in Namimbia, and how the lack of these cultural objects transforms into an intergenerational trauma that still influences Namimbia’s various social and cultural groups. Mekondjo examines methods of inscription of such influences in her work, by use of also everyday contexts, blending them with archival research material, such as for example historical photographs held in European archives. Many times the remnants of every day colonial life such as for instance the imposed Western clothing styles to Namimbians, while domestic work was carried out in white homes by Namibian women, and the languages that are officially spoken in the country as opposed to those that have been lost. The restoration of fertility channels as a healing process and a way to connect with and honor her ancestors is central to TuliMekondjo’s artistic engagement with her own biography. This is particularly evident in this body of work, where she is recreating the fertility dolls that served a symbolic purpose of a woman having offsprings, and were passed down the generations in pre-colonial Aawambo communities, but now only exist in the collections of western ethnographic museums, and specifically here in Switzerland at the Neuchatel ethnographic museum.