Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

At a recent conference dedicated to reviewing
the former editions of Documenta, held in the
fall of 2009 at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin,
Okwui Enwezor pointed out that as curator of
the 12 th edition he wished to address how the
global sphere narrates in relation to a wider
range of traditions of form. This re-addressing
of the traditions in and around the narrative and
within oral culture seemed to evoke Jacques
Ranciere’s thoughts about the poetic utterance
as that which links the modern stance with
political subjectivity. For Ranciere, poetry is an
“art of composing fables that belongs to the
political experience of the physical – that is to
the relationship of the city – the laws that reign
there, but also to the songs that are sung and
to the humour of the citizens.”
This understanding of the poetic is perhaps the
best way to approach the working method of
Zambian-born artist Anawana Haloba.
Haloba’s artistic practice is symbiotically
linked to her preparatory exercise of drafting
poetry in the form of sketches, which she then
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abstracts into performative-based works within
installations incorporating moving images,
objects and sound. “I look at my work as a
project in the form of an ongoing discussion –
a work that does not strive toward completion
but is rendered as a point of departure from
which a discussion starts,” observes Haloba.
As an artist who attests to having written
poetry from the time she could formulate a
coherent sentence, Haloba insists that her
reason for doing so was not to align herself
with script that reflected the childlike visions
of the fantastic or the rhythmic redundancy of
the onomatopoetic. Instead, Haloba sourced
the visual and socio-political landscape
immediately available within her native Zambia
in the formulation of her still youthful text:
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