The Distance Within

(Hardback)

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Description

Featuring photographs and video stills made over more than a decade, The Distance Within reflects on Nicola Brandt's German and Namibian inheritance and deconstructs certain established ways of seeing Namibia. Brandt traveled the country extensively, documenting landscapes and people, structures and encounters, to reveal ensnared histories of German colonialism, National Socialism and apartheid. Markers of these histories range from the ephemeral and private, such as a dilapidated mound of stones as a roadside memorial, to official sites of remembrance and resistance, particularly for colonial atrocities. Alongside her images, Brandt assembles texts by thought leaders in photography, postcolonial cultures, memory and genocide studies, as well as material from private and public archives, to understand enduring blind spots. The result is an intersectional argument in favor of reclaiming suppressed indigenous stories and identities, undoing romantic notions of whiteness, and, ultimately, illuminating what has not been visible.

Author Bio

Nicola Brandt is a Namibian artist of German and South African descent. Her work forms part of intergovernmental talks between Namibia and Germany and has been shown at the National Art Gallery of Namibia, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Universities of Yale and Stanford, and Museum Wrth in Germany, among others. Brandt is the author of Landscapes Between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art (2020) and has contributed to publications including The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020), co-edited by Simon Njami and Sean O'Toole, and the reader of the thirteenth Bamako Biennale (2022).