Helena Uambembe

Helena Uambembe was born in 1994 in Pomfret, South Africa, of Angolan descent, and lives and works in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice — encompassing textiles, printmaking, photography, performance, installation, and text — is shaped by the extraordinary history of her family. Her father was among the Angolan men conscripted into South Africa's apartheid-era 32nd Battalion, a unit composed primarily of Black Angolan men who fought in the Namibian War of Independence; her mother was among the women who began families within the military settlement at Pomfret, a South African town where residents were later forced to mine asbestos. This complex inheritance of forced migration, generational trauma, and political shame is central to her work.

Uambembe's practice is organized around four conceptual elements: archives, memory, body, and language. The body holds particular significance as a receptacle of knowledge and a register of residual trauma. Her engagement with archives is active rather than preservationist: she inserts herself into historical imagery, bends time through interfering with material she encounters, and uses sonic installation and performance to reclaim oral tradition, mixing hymns across South African, Angolan, and Namibian idioms. Her recent work has moved toward notions of repair, restitution, and collective healing.

Uambembe has had solo exhibitions at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Jahmek Contemporary Art in Luanda and Basel, CIRCA in Cape Town, and FNB Art Joburg in Johannesburg. She was awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2022, the DAAD Visual Arts Fellowship in Berlin in 2023, and the Ars Viva Prize in 2024. She is represented by Jahmek Contemporary Art and Jan Kaps.