Collection

The work of Kiluanja Kia Henda (b. 1979) is devoted to historical monuments. This is a statement about places that struggle with collective memory, and commemoration becomes an element of the game in which history is at stake. The Angolan artist portrays the fashion designer Shunnoz Fiela dos Santos on an empty pedestal in the centre of Luanda. The statue removed from the pedestal represented the Portuguese coloniser Paolo Dias de Novais. Angola declared independence in 1975, but already during the war of independence Portuguese statues began to disappear from pedestals in the squares in the centre of Luanda. Henda’s photographs are a question of Angola’s historical memory - after four centuries of the colonial conflict and three decades of the civil war. They are an attempt to introduce new, “positive” concepts of the nation’s future into public discourse. They also show how the city becomes a multi-layered record of ongoing history. His friends photographed on empty pedestals become the faces of new, emerging post-colonial society, and through this performative gesture Henda opens up space for cherishing communal dreams. Thus, these places become anti-monuments, no longer commemorating the past, but trying to set a new direction for building the future.