Coming of age during a war-torn, post-independence Angola informs conceptual artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s multidisciplinary practice, particularly how he approaches coloniality and the remnants of civil conflict. Utilizing historical consciousness and alternative retellings of the past, his projects seek to create scenarios that straddle the line between fact and fiction, bringing together historical narratives and future imaginaries. Kia Henda portrays Angolan society in a liberatory and reparatory light, often with a humorous or epic touch, as in the performative series Redefining the Power (2011), in which people stand on the plinths where colonial statues once stood, or his 2022 exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in London, A Healing Path for Phantom Pain, which focused on the entangled histories of humanitarian aid and empire by showing orthopaedic aids alongside landmine recovery equipment, highlighting their continued enmeshment. For Echos der Bruderländer, Kia Henda presents an evocative photo triptych showing the rusting hull of the Karl Marx-Luanda. The ship was once part of a progressive Soviet-Angolan fishing initiative, but today lies abandoned on Santiago Beach, its slow decay polluting the surrounding environment. Installed in front of the photos, a circle of pieces collected from the disintegrating vessel evoke the fragmentation and harmful legacies of the Cold War. A new short film, The Cemetery of Boats, unravels this story of aspirations surrounding the fishing cooperative, featuring recollections of the artist’s cousin Filipinho, who in 1979 settled in Rostov, USSR as one of the thousands of Angolan students involved in socialist cultural exchanges. The film combines Filipinho’s love for the Afrodescendant father of Russian literature Alexander Pushkin, in conjunction with Kia Henda’s own elaborations about his family’s participation in the dream of building a new Angolan society. The result is a multifaceted picture of the country’s post-independence history, its intricate connections with the Soviet Union, and the reverberations of international socialist exchange and alliances.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Kiluanji Kia Henda and HKW, 2023–24. The artist would like to thank the Gwaertler Stiftung for their kind support of the research for this project.

Works in the exhibition: Karl Marx-Luanda (2006, 2023), 3 photographs, inkjet print on photographic paper, 130 × 86 cm, metal scraps, dimensions variable; The Cemetery of Boats (2024), film, Portuguese and Russian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist