The Art of Memory: Colonialism, History, and Gender in Contemporary Namibian Art

The History Department is pleased to welcome a small exhibit of contemporary Namibian art to University College London during its bicentennial year that speaks to UCL’s historical ties to southern Africa as well as to global debates about memory, decolonization, and race. The exhibition is made possible based on a generous loan by Guns & Rain, a Johannesburg- and London-based gallery. It is housed on the ground floor of 24 Gordon Square and consists of two works by Namibian artists Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt.

Image 1: Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt, “Wrapped”, 2022 (90x60cm) 

Image 2: Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt, “New Dawn”, 2022 (90x60cm)

In recent years, artists in southern Africa have increasingly intervened in spaces of power, often through photography, video, and performance. Both works form part of a larger mixed media series, Man Of War: Leave My House, which reflects a new wave of decolonial art and intersectional activism in Namibia. The artworks explore the successful grassroots activist campaign in 2022 to remove the apartheid-era monument to the colonial ‘founder’ of Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, the German conquistador Curt von François. All born in Namibia, of Herero and German backgrounds respectively, Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka and Nicola Brandt invite us to consider how to respond to problematic monuments. The artists symbolically confront the colonial statue of von François in Windhoek on the day of its removal, 23 November 2022. This work forms part of a broader effort to process traumatic legacies connected to German colonialism and apartheid, and intersectional violence, which is tied to contemporary patriarchy and identity politics. 

In this way, the artists also address UCL’s historical ties to southern Africa, most notably in the emergence of eugenics and, in turn, the influence of eugenic ideas on South African racial segregation. Before Francis Galton founded the Eugenics Record Office on Gower Street in 1904, his views on race emerged during an expedition to what is today Namibia in 1850-1852. Galton derided local peoples as supposedly barbaric and prehistoric. His experience was pivotal in shaping his view that the purported racial superiority of Europeans was grounded in an evolutionary process of ‘civilization’ that rendered the customs of ‘savage’ peoples obsolete. Galton’s ideas became one strand of thought in the disparate project of apartheid, for example in the notion of the ‘arrested development’ of black children compared to white peers, which became one justification for school segregation in the Bantu Education Act of 1953. At UCL, the Eugenics Record Office became part of the university in 1907 as the Galton Eugenics Laboratory. In 2018, the activism of UCL students led to an inquiry into the university’s connection to eugenics. Although this activism eventually led to the removal of Galton’s name from university buildings in 2020, the artworks of Uzera, Hoveka, and Brandt remind us of the enduring global legacies of European racialism.

Join the official launch of the small exhibit on 14 May 2026, 16:00-18:00.