online screening 6–19 June 2021
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Indifference, 2014
HD Triptych Video Installation, 14 minutes 09 seconds, continuous loop. Video still with Uakondjisa Kakuekuee Mbari. Courtesy of the artist.
Indifference
a film by Nicola Brandt
Indifference (2014), HD Triptych Video Installation, 14 minutes 09 seconds, continuous loop
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The multiscreen video work Indifference reflects on how the Genocide and the war of the OvaHerero and Nama against the German coloniser (1904–1908) is recalled today.
It explores moments in the lives of two women through fragments of their lived experiences. The stories are accompanied by large-scale triptychs of the Namibian desert coastline and its hinterland. These deceitfully beautiful, derelict landscapes contain places of historical violence. The video foregrounds involuntary memory, and the way that unresolved trauma breaks out in everyday engagements. Through this work, German historical memory and the romantic tradition that sustains it are interrogated.
Parts of the video are set in !Nami≠Nûs (previously Lüderitzbucht) in Namibia, which is the same name as the Changing Room’s physical street address in Wedding, Berlin.
Nicola Brandt is a Namibian-born artist that has exhibited her work internationally. Her cross-disciplinary work explores the tangled legacies of colonialism and apartheid and their impacts on the land and memory culture she grew up in. Her work featured as part of intergovernmental talks between Namibia and Germany.
Brandt is currently working on a photo book, which reflects on her photographic, video, and installation work created over the past ten years since the removal of the ‘Reiterdenkmal’ – a German colonial monument in the centre of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia.
She is the author of the monograph 'Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art' (2020). She has also recently founded the research and publishing platform 'Conversations Across Place' (CAP).
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