Helena Uambembe is an interdisciplinary artist working with textiles, printmaking, photography and performance. She was born in Pomfret the North West, South Africa in 1994 to Angolan parents who fled the civil war raging in their country. Her father was a soldier in the 32 Battalion, a military unit within the South African Defence Force primarily made up of black Angolan men. Drawing on her own life story, Uambembe reflects on the erasure of histories of conflict and complicity of South Africa’s wars in Angola and Namibia, and the unspoken legacies of those wars that shadow the present. She lives and works between Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa.
The 32 Battalion, Pomfret and her Angolan heritage are dominant themes in Uambembe’s work. She explores narratives surrounding history and place, interweaving connected symbols and archival material. The artist navigates shifting attitudes not towards war itself, but towards the gatekeepers of information and narratives on war.
Her 2022 installation titled What You See is not What You Remember consists of furniture and things that she remembers being in her mother’s home. It was an attempt to recreate a space that captures the memory of a home. The work plays on the idea of nostalgia and how people replace things to remember things. With this work Uambembe wanted to comment on how certain instants are not as they appear. This highlights the things within the home that are not the way they are supposed to be. It is a look at the history of colonialism. At the same time, it is the belief that the reality of Africans should not include some of the things that are now considered norms.
In addition to her own practice, Uambembe is a member of the collective Kutala Chopeto, alongside artist Teresa Kutala Firmino. Both the artists’ families come from the military community 32 Battalion. Until they started this initiative, all they knew about the unit had mainly been written from a white perspective. This referred to these men as savages and traitors who were used by the apartheid government to kill their own brothers during the Angolan civil war. In other words, both artists wanted to know more about these stories and possibly change the perspective from which they are perceived.
Uambembe’s group shows include the PINK exhibition, at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg. Additionally, she has done The Borders of Memory exhibition with Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo at Guns & Rain in Johannesburg. Uambembe was one of the Bag Factory’s three 2019 David Koloane Award winners. She also won the Baloise Art Prize 2022 at the international Art Basel Fair in Paris, France. Thereafter, her work was acquired and donated to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, Germany.
