SKULKESKOLEN
Plattform: Dr. Memory Biwa
14:00
Part of SKULKESKOLEN, 2–6 September 2026
Join us for a talk by Dr. Memory Biwa in response to Anawana Haloba’s exhibition “From This Darkness I Shall Grow”.
In 2024, Dr. Memory Biwa was working on two sound installations. The first, Dreamwav (Nyaminyami Tidalectics), 2024, attends to the Zambezi river and the cataclysmic events set in motion by the construction of the Kariba Dam (Credo Mutwa). The second, Ozerandu, 2024, delves into the emptying of land through iron-ore extraction, from across the !Garib to south-west Germany, evoking material memory buried in the activation of a ruin as a postindustrial site.
While working on these two installations, each attending to the history of a river, she dreamt of tidal waves engulfing her home, a dream that coincided with floods in waking life. The lecture departs from this coincidence to draw on the pairing of histories in Anawana Haloba’s sculptural-sonorous constellations, engaging with the urgencies of hydro-coloniality, submerged cosmologies that upend time-space linearity, and converging ecologies.
Memory Biwa is a historian and artist who lives between Windhoek and Berlin. Her research-based practice draws on oral histories, aurality and sartorial enactments of anticolonial resistance and genocide in Namibia to address contestations over memorial and reparative processes. She engages with aurality and public commemoration as sites of technology and knowledge that explore multiple geographies and imaginaries. Biwa’s recent artistic research on the migration histories between southern Namibia and the North-Western Cape enacts the !Garib riverscape as a transregional drosters passageway.
Biwa earned a doctorate in Historical Studies from the University of the Western Cape (UWC). And has held postdoctoral positions on sound archives and listening practices at the University of Cape Town, and at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation. As part of Pungwe Listening collective they were awarded grants from New Music South Africa, UCT Institute of Creative Arts, an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica, and a fellowship from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme in 2021/2022. Pungwe Listening has presented sonic-sculptural installations at Dakar Biennale, Savvy Contemporary, Manifesta 13 and ifa Gallery. Biwa has exhibited at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte, Berlin Biennale, and co-curated a city-wide immersive audio walk at Wiesbaden Biennale.
Plattform is Bergen Kunsthall’s series of lectures and debates. This summer, we present lectures and conversations in connection with the exhibitions of Anawana Haloba and Hanni Kamaly. This Plattform event will not be streamed live but will be recorded and posted on our website, Facebook and Vimeo.
Also part of SKULKESKOLEN
Saturday 5 Sept: Kathryn Yusoff and Nolan Oswald Dennis · Anawana Haloba reading · C.A.N.V.A.S
Credits
The first edition of SKULKESKOLEN is co-curated by Jade Meili Barget and Nora O’ Murchú and developed in partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The programme is generously supported by Culture Ireland, as part of Cultúr 2026: Sharing Ireland’s Culture, the culture programme for Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2026, Fritt Ord, KORO, Kulturrådet/Arts Council Norway, Mondriaan Fund and Sparebanken Norge.
Design: Minami Shimakage.
