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
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
2018: KutalaChopeto [Seeking Comfort], World Refugee Day exhibition. Point of Order, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Group exhibitions
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
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.
