Tuli Mekondjo lives and works in Windhoek. A self-taught artist, she works with mixed media (embroidery, collage, paint, resin, and mahangu grain – a food staple of the Ovambo people) to create beautiful poetic works filled with layers of meaning. Drawing on photographic archives and histories of the loss and erasure of Namibian cultural practices, she explores history and identity politics from the perspective of those who lived in exile during Namibia’s independence war. Dissatisfied with dominant narratives about the past and confronted with lacunas at both the communal and personal level, she pursued archival and oral history research in a quest for understanding, healing, and belonging. She offers new postcolonial, postfeminist vantage points on a history that has mostly been told by men.

Mekondjo was born in Angola to Namibian parents who joined the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in exile in the early 1980s during the Namibian War of Independence (1966-1990). This period in exile was a fundamentally formative experience for the artist. Mekondjo uses photographic images from public as well as personal archives to revisit – and learn about afresh – the wartime context of her early childhood, growing up in the refugee camps of Kwanza-Sul (Angola) and Nyango (Zambia). “It is very much my story”, says Mekondjo, “trying to understand what it was like”. In her current series of works, the archival photographs are a witness to the lives of women and children whose stories have often been overlooked in prevailing masculine and patriotic histories of the war – and a means through which the artist re-engages her past.

Mekondjo states about her use or old images: “There is something about old photographs, they tell a story about a time capsule that is long gone, photographs captures the essence of the souls forever frozen in their poses, gestures and pains, regrets and joys. What were their profound memories of the pasts that they knew? Could any of our very own ancestors be captured in one of these archival images, without us knowing of them? For some people, they’re simply photographs of people, long gone but for me there’s a connection, is almost like a remembrance for me, what if I was there before, before this lifetime.” The sensitively painted botanical vines and plants pay homage to these forebears, while also symbolizing fertility and continuity. These floral motives are an invitation to the ancestors, for their assistance and guidance in the present.

Mekondjo was a participant in the Future Africa Visions in Time exhibition, a 2018 collaboration between the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, Iwalewahaus Bayreuth and the Goethe-Institut Namibia. She exhibited with the NJE Collective at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2019, the FNB Joburg Art Fair 2018. In 2019, she exhibited in the women’s show “Suffrage” at Guns & Rain, at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London, and had a solo show with the Project Room in Windhoek. In February 2021, she exhibited at the Frac Nouvelle Aquitaine (MÉCA) in Bordeaux.