FELLOW 2024
Memory Biwa is a historian and artist. Her research addresses anticolonial resistance, genocide, memory, and reparative processes in Namibia. Biwa’s practice interweaves aurality, historical production, and geographies.
Biwa has curated workshops, among them: “We Grow With Our Leaves, and Flowers Turned towards Home,” a transnational project between Cape Town, South Africa, and Berlin, Germany in 2024. And “Prossession Pedagogies,” as part of the artist residency program between Namibia and Germany hosted by Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2023. Biwa has also cocurated exhibitions, including “A Sacred Story at the Tree of Life” at Ifa Gallery in 2023 in Berlin and “Die Vibration der Dinge” (The Vibration of Things) at the Kleinplastik Triennale in 2022 in Fellbach. Biwa is also part of the duo, Pungwe Listening, with Robert Machiri. Their work centers Southern African aural histories and multimedia archives and presents relational art formats through performance, installation, and collective curatorial practice in durational play in public space.
Pungwe Listening has presented their work on the Pan African Space Station at Mkuki na Nyota in Dar es Salaam, Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain in Dakar, Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, Ifa Gallery in Berlin and Stuttgart, and at the Kunsthalle Bern. Pungwe Listening was awarded the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship in 202, and the project received an honorary mention by Prix Ars Electronica in the category Digital Communities in 2020.
