Helena Uambembe
Helena Uambembe Helena Uambembe

Helena Uambembe

b. Pomfret, Northern Cape, South Africa, 1994. Lives in Johannesburg.


Helena Uambembe is an interdisciplinary artist (textiles, printmaking, photography, performance). Drawing on her own life story, Helena 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.   

Education

2023: ASAI Print Access Workshop, Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg. 
2018: B Tech in Fine and Applied Arts, Tshwane University of Technology, Tshwane.
2016: National Diploma in Fine and Applied Arts, Tshwane University of Technology, Tshwane.

Solo exhibitions

2021: Pim Pam Pum, NWU Gallery, North West University, Potchefstroom.
2021: How to make Mud Cake. Cubicle Series. Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town.
2020: Home and the Other. FNB Art Joburg. Online.
2018:  KutalaChopeto [Seeking Comfort], World Refugee Day exhibition. Point of Order, Johannesburg.

Group exhibitions

2021: Territories Between Us. Iziko Museum, Cape Town.
2021: Home for the Holidays. Danger Gevaar Ingozi Studio, Johannesburg
2021: Feminism Ya Mang, Yethy, Yanu. Goethe Institut, Johannesburg
2021: Shape of Blackness. Oakstop Project Space, California.
2020: The African Art Fair. Movart Gallery, Online.
2020: Pink. Everard Read, Johannesburg.
2020: Through Our Eyes Narrative of Angolan Narratives. Abuja Art Week, Online.
2020: The Politics is Now. Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize. Aspire Art, Johannesburg.
2020: FNB Art Joburg, Luamba Muinga, Johannesburg. 
2020:  Qual Futuro, Online exhibition.
2020:  The Borders of Memory, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg.
2020:  Covert Bioscope, Bag Factory Artist Studios. Online Exhibition.
2019:  Texidermia do Futuro. Museu National de Historia Natural, Luanda, Angola.
2019:  Multiplies, Johannesburg.
2019:  Resistance is Us. ABSA Art Gallery, Johannesburg.
2019:  Summer Salon, Bag Factory Artist Studios, Johannesburg.
2019:  The Warmth of Other Suns, The Melrose Gallery, Johannesburg.
2019:  Print Like a Girl, Turbine Art Fair, Gallery 2, Johannesburg.
2019:  Print Like a Girl, Art Room Gallery, Johannesburg.
2019:  Compulsive exhibition, Johanne van Heerden Gallery, Pretoria, South Africa.
2019:  Mark-making, Trent Gallery, Pretoria.
2019:  I don’t know what you are talking about, but I know what you mean, PASTOgalleria, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2019:  Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Offsetculture.art, Cape Town, South Africa.
2019:  Spaces in Between, Tmrw Gallery, Johannesburg.
2018:  TUT Studio exhibition 2018, TUT Arts Campus, Pretoria.
2018:  Till Art Do Us Apart, TUT Art Festival, Pretoria.
2018:  Print Art – Now and Then, Trent Gallery, Pretoria.
2017:  Silences in Between, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town.
2017:  Nirox Sculpture Winter Fair, Krugersdorp, South Africa.
2017:  The Centre of the less good idea season 1, Arts on Main, Johannesburg.
2017:  South-South. Let us begin again. Goodman Gallery Cape Town.

Performances

2019:  ​Caminho do Mato, Caminho do Flores, Flores de Amor Extended,  Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg.
2019: ​Caminho do Mato, Caminho do Flores, Flores de Amor, FNB Joburg Art Fair, Johannesburg.
2019:  ​Therapy for the Black Man (In Honour of...), Underline Projects, Johannesburg.
2019:  ​Load I shall Carry (Prayer to mother Njinga), The Melrose Gallery, Johannesburg.
2018: Tchiganchi, The Point of Order, Johannesburg.

Conferences

2019:  The Violence of an Anxious Mind - Panel Discussion, Bag Factory Artist
Studios, Johannesburg.
2019:  David Koloane Panel Discussion, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg.
2019:  AFEMS – African Feminism Conference, Performing Normalcy: A focus on the
Women of the 32 Battalion, Johannesburg.
2018:  BLT People’s Table, Johannesburg.
2016:  The History we are told not to Speak (The history of the Pomfret community), Unisa School of Arts Conference, Pretoria.
2016:  Black Portraiture iii. The Untold Story of the Pomfret Community, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Texts

Nkgopolent Moloi, Are we not makers of history? I reflecting on spatial and temporal memory, BubblegumClub, 2021.
Keely Shinners, Listening to images of 32 Battalion, ASAI, 2021.
Fadzai Muchemwa, A History of Disruption: Helena Uambembe’s ‘Commander Nel’s Archive,’ ArtThrob, 2021.
Nkgopoleng Moloi, Artist Helena Uambembe confronts a painful past and compresses time, BubblegumClub, 2021.
Helena Uambembe, This is not the Angola that we dreamed of, South-South, 2020.

 

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