ARTIST STATEMENT

By choosing mainly the female form, Katjavivi reflects on the closely related subjects of healing and memory. This often results in her exploration of the self. Katjavivi has tackled her identity via exploring her heritage, her ancestry, her body, and growth after abuse. Her current subject focuses on the OvaHerero Genocide, and how art can be used to commemorate such a painful history. Her installations are based on formal associations which open a unique  poetic vein. She absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.  Her installations establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence. By exploring the concept of nostalgia and how it relates to landscape, she investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to the onlooker. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an ‘embodied’ illusion is fabricated to conjure realms of our imagination and memory in a multi-layered way.