In her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo (*1982) presents a practice that combines personal experience with collective memory - a process in which history, materiality and spirituality are interwoven. Mekondjo works with textiles, photography, sculpture, video and archival material. Her works deal with Namibia's colonial past and its repercussions that can still be felt today – from cultural erasure and environmental destruction to social trauma and fragmentation.

A central theme of her work is the reclaiming of cultural assets and access to colonial archives that document the colonial legacy - and in which the knowledge and voices of those affected are often missing. Mekondjo questions the role of Western institutions as custodians and interpreters of these materials and demands visibility and participation for the communities.

Her installation reflects on how cultural objects – once part of daily life – were removed from their local context by missionaries, ethnographers and travellers who either looted, exchanged or bought them for their collections. The absence of these cultural artefacts does not allow for transmitting ancestral knowledges, resulting in intergenerational trauma across Namibia’s various social and cultural groups.

By incorporating historical photographs from European archives and organic materials, Mekondjo develops a visual language of memory—resisting erasure, reclaiming history, and promoting healing. For example, her work reveals the impact of colonial violence, such as the forced adoption of Western clothing and hairstyles on Namibian domestic workers in white households.

At Kunsthalle Bern, Tuli Mekondjo presents a newly commissioned expansive installation exploring the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel’s collection of “constructed children”, what in Western ethnography is called fertility dolls. Restoring fertility channels as a healing process and a way to connect with and honour her ancestors is central to Tuli Mekondjo’s artistic engagement with her own biography. This is particularly evident in this body of work, in which she recreates these “constructed children”, which served a symbolic purpose of a woman having offspring, and were passed down through the generations in pre-colonial Aawambo communities. Now, however, they only exist in the collections of western ethnographic museums, and specifically in Switzerland at the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel, which kindly lends one of these artefacts for the exhibition; a rare example of a “constructed child” with a name: Nadula.

Using organic materials, textiles, and historical photographs, Mekondjo creates a visual language that keeps memory alive instead of hiding it in archives – as resistance, as reclamation, as healing.