Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

and Australia, initiated an external study group under the name
The Postcolonial Reader to introduce, read and discuss postcolonialism
in an effort to approach visual culture from a non-
Eurocentric model of history. The group eventually disbanded
when the respective students graduated, but in the years that
it operated in Oslo, its members discussed how the Occident is
repeatedly at risk of giving itself over to the West or of being
recast as more archaic, less diversified communities.
Haloba’s relationship with the renowned performance artist
Joan Jonas, her former tutor at the Rijksakademie, initiated
yet a new cycle and process for the artist, marking a period
when Haloba sought to delve more concretely into her own
personal history and culture while interweaving more universal
elements, which helped to extract this experience to a wider
frame of understanding. Haloba cites the importance of the
experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who was so central to
the work of Joan Jonas, as an influence on her own sensibility.
Deren provided a model for breaking down the motif of ritual
to explore the rendering of myths and divinities for the purpose
of simple poetic pondering: How do people recreate different
cultures, and how do they come to terms with the cultures from
which they are borrowing? What are the parallels to be found
from an artist such as Joan Jonas, who borrows and applies
from a distance, and someone immersed in an internal exile
who confronts these issues more directly and on an everyday
basis? At the centre of these questions is an understanding that
exile generates a creative imagination. While maintaining an
analytical point of view from the perspective of Africa/Zambia/
Lusaka/Oslo, Haloba seeks to unravel the global “narrative” that
Enwezor refers to from an analytical perspective which is not
about “storytelling” alone.
At present, Anawana Haloba is immersed in research initiatives
to further her understanding of the layers of her own native
language. Reading Nonkeleko, the artist is studying Lozi society
as it existed before British colonialism in order to learn more
about self-governance and the role women played within that
structure. A social history such as Nonkeleko or the 1954 film
entitled Les Maitre Fous (Mad Masters), a film about Nigeria by
the French filmmaker Jean Rouch, can provide the raw materials
that help the artist understand ritual from the point of its falling
apart and dissolution. In Haloba’s process of what Blanchot refers
to as an “unworking”, she combines that which “exists before and
beyond the work, with that which withdraws from the work, as a
way to approach that which has neither to do with production or
completion, but with interpretation and suspension and poetics.”
maRta Kuzma
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