Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

Arts in Oslo. She notes that at the time she felt a clear split of
self – from perceiving herself as a twenty-one-year-old located
within a vibrant time of her life, to an experience of the other,
distanced self who enters into the architectural regiment of
student housing to encounter an environment of isolation and
suffer the feeling of a loss of community.
“As a foreigner, I had a very heightened physical sense of
exclusion and in that sense, my life assumed a particular track of
exile,” Haloba explained. As a consequence, the artist manifested
this sense of exile by casting her body and hands in plaster and
installing the empty casts as ciphers of alienation. “I have always
worked with hands and arms,” she offers, “as a way to express my
own thinking – understanding hand gestures as more layered in
meaning than facial gestures, and invested in the understanding
that hands open out of a very private narrative into one about
sharing and inclusion.”
The cathartic and performative nature of Haloba’s individual
works is rooted in the artist’s earlier performances, realised
when she was still part of a collective with eight other artists
in Lusaka. Framed as a single evening of events, the individual
performances were staged in various public spaces throughout
the city in an attempt to engage with the subjective responses
of the individual viewer or city dweller. Haloba, who was
originally educated within the sciences, choreographed her
performances to both reflect upon and explore the neurological
stimulus between the artist and the viewer. It was at this time
that Haloba first realised the “salt-licked maps” that were later
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documented on video. The performance involves the artist
kneeling down and ritualistically manoeuvring throughout
the salt-covered floor’s surface, drawing out imaginary maps
with her tongue. The tongue operates on some visceral level
to communicate the discomfort associated with this act while
audibly transposing the psychoacoustics associated with this
discomfort. At the same time, the tongue operates as a device
of demystification with respect to the more historical reality
– the scramble for Africa when the continent was randomly
divided by the colonialists.
Haloba’s early performances in Lusaka did not draw on the
traditions of the dérive or the psycho-geography prevalent
within the practices of the Situationists in France during the
1960s. Rather, the collective’s performance referenced an
anthropological and a metaphorical uprooting of a complicated
history of partition prevalent throughout Africa. Although
not directly referential, Haloba investigates the possible
consciousness of a lost and broken community on a more
abstract level to communicate the experience of internal
exile. Within internal exile, identity may be reconceived of
retrospectively through the past or it may be reconstructed
according to past images and past experiences for the sake of
an ideal future. Haloba uses both these approaches and, in doing
so, finds it necessary to infuse the more abstract discussions
with a recuperation of the real history. As a student of the
National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo from 2004–2006,
Haloba, together with fellow students from Colombia, Namibia