What gets enshrined in the landscape of public memory? Who decides what gets remembered, and in what forms? Whose stories are retained and whose excluded? Julie Taylor’s Entangled exhibition, which opened during summer 2024 at Rhodes House in Oxford, grapples with these questions through a series of artworks from talented Southern African artists exploring colonial legacies of violence, exploitation, migration, ecological and social inequality, and decolonisation. Consistent with ODID’s mission and research to understand the structures and processes that underpin inequality and exploitation, Entangled provides a thought-provoking forum to reckon with Rhodes’ legacy globally. Importantly, it offers an affront to the colonial legacies and structures embedded in Oxford’s institutions, and begs audiences to question the nuanced histories and motives behind national landscapes of public memory.

The works, spanning sculpture, photography, performance, painting and mixed media, are credited to Zimbabwean, South African, and Namibian artists, including Nicola Brandt, Isheanesu Dondo, Raymond Fuyana, Muningandu Hoveka, Tuli Mekondjo, Zenaéca Singh, and Gift Uzera. ODID and Rhodes alumna, Julie Taylor, has curated the exhibit as part of her larger mission as founder of Guns and Rain, a Johannesburg-based art gallery dedicated to promoting new African artists and their works globally.

While South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia have vastly different histories and current social, political and economic dynamics, they also share parallel political histories of multiple waves of settler colonialism and resource extraction, as well as national liberation movements that have evolved into political parties which continue to hold power and espouse patriotic histories. These histories, which reflect a vision of the nation founded on the glorification of anti-colonial revolution and triumph, still influence memory creation and nation building. In particular, patriotic histories feature in history curricula, heritage sites, museums and memorialisation projects in each country. At times, this partial and subjective depiction of the nation can preclude competing historical and political views from marginalised communities. The role of artists to confront and destabilise extant understandings of social, political and environmental representations of the nation is therefore critical to widen public discourse on Southern Africa, both locally and globally. This includes through popular art, which enacts a process of creating awareness and taking progressive action, and can provide a platform to communicate visions of an imagined future.

The camera never lies?

Importantly, Entangled grapples with the themes of awareness and imagined possibilities by interrogating the fabric of these nations through questions of memory, monuments and what we value. Both Tuli Mekondjo’s and Zenaéca Singh’s pieces examine and reimagine the role of colonial archival photography and text on memory-making. Mekondjo’s transformation of archival photos of Namibia’s Owambo community to embellished mixed media pieces using soil, embroidery, mahangu (millet), silks, paint and resin prompts viewers to question the colonial gaze which robs the histories and potential of subjects in photography. Mekondjo’s purchase and transformation of archival photos from German-Namibian sellers also demands a reclamation of identity for Namibian communities who have faced multiple waves of colonialism (German between 1884 and 1919, and South African from 1965 to 1990). Central to themes of historical representations of knowledge reproduction, Mekondjo highlights concepts of death and rebirth in Momulonga ohatu ka nangala ongali / In the river, we will lay on our backs (2021). Similarly, Singh’s sugar and molasses sculptures re-imagine and re-memorialise archival histories and experiences of indentured South African Indian labourers who worked on KwaZulu Natal sugar plantations from 1865 to 1911 under British colonial rule. Her use of painting and sculpture, fashioned into houseware, reimagines a history of migration, labour, resource extraction and domesticity underrepresented in memorialised understandings of the sugar economy and South African history. In they came with sweetness not of sugarcane or cotton, but of air (2024), Singh’s use of household vintage frames and archival footage of sugar plantation workers, partially obscured by molasses which effaces details of the workers themselves, prompts viewers to consider these faceless workers and the origins of sugar so common in our domestic spheres.

Challenging colonial monuments and current nationalisms

Addressing Southern Africa’s colonial legacies, artists Isheanesu Dondo, Raymond Fuyana, Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka and Nicola Brandt also use their artwork to question what is remembered, and how this continues to affect historical understandings of the nation, against a backdrop of dismantling and deconstructing colonial-era monuments. Using a series of ink and acrylic paintings, Dondo complicates the history of colonial presence in Zimbabwe popularly visible in Harare Freemasonry architecture. By superimposing the shapes and lines popularised in such buildings by the similar designs of traditional Bantu architecture, Dondo encourages a questioning of imperial visual culture found around Harare, which can be transcended by the potential spiritual and philosophical similarities and exchanges between Bantu communities and colonial-era architects. Alongside the theme of disrupting and reimagining colonial legacies, Raymond Fuyana questions memorialisation in Regular Time: Kimberley (2024), which depicts the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley, South Africa – a memorial to British soldiers who died defending Kimberley in the 1899-1902 South African war. Through a creative depiction and reconfiguration of the memorial site, Fuyana dismantles colonial-era monuments and questions the versions of history that are remembered, who is celebrated, and what remains intact amid ongoing extraction, capitalism, conflict and inequality.

Queer and feminist ideologies in response to colonial figures

Uzera, Hoveka and Brandt’s Man of War: Leave My House questions how history and memory are captured and sustained through state-sanctioned memorialisation efforts. In the performance-film, Uzera and Hoveka confront the statue of Curt von François, a German Schutztruppe officer and commissioner of German South-West Africa, which was removed from Namibia’s capital Windhoek after ongoing protests in 2022. This type of performance, called the otjina, is a traditional Herero ritual often performed by women at celebrations. Uzera and Hoveka’s version, augmented by the untraditional donning of Herero dress, also questions dominant ideas of gender, sexuality and power structures, constituting one aspect of Namibia’s burgeoning decolonial intersectional activism, which claims space for women, minority groups and queer people. This stands in contrast with the European masculinity expressed in both German military triumph and Namibian patriotic histories. In this way, the artists question why we accord value to particular events and figures in national history, and encourage a subversion and reimagining of colonial legacy.

Nicola Brandt’s Physical Energy (2020 and 2021) continues this interrogation of who and how we memorialise, with a focus on Cecil Rhodes and the work of his contemporary, sculptor G.F. Watts. Through a series of photographs that include images of the destruction caused by the 2021 Cape Town fire that damaged the sites of the Rhodes Memorial and the University of Cape Town library, Brandt prompts a questioning of the celebration of material gain – at what cost and to whom?

With its location in Rhodes House at the heart of former empire, Entangled demands attention and further reckoning with Rhodes’s legacy and the broader heritage of colonialism in Southern Africa. Through Taylor’s careful curation and the work of seven extremely talented artists, audiences can connect historical legacies of violence, displacement, extraction and exploitation with the current landscape of memory, in a broad call to ask what gets remembered, in what ways, and why? What do we enjoy, at what costs? Whose stories are we not hearing and how can we imagine new possibilities of memorialisation that are decolonial and just?

View Entangled online here or visit in person at Rhodes House on open days.