Anawana Haloba (Livingstone, Zambia, 1978) lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. Her artistic practice is symbiotically linked to and through her preparatory exercise in drafting poetry in the forms of sketches from which, the artist abstracts to performative based artworks within moving image, installation, and sound, while creating situations where the material culture of any given place can be probed and reconsidered within the scheme of rapidly shifting contemporary subjectivities. Recently, her research investigates the epistemologically oppressed kowledges and technologies through methods of listening and other oral understanding to activate (re)pair and opacity.
Haloba’s work has been shown in institution such as Centre Pompidou, France; Oslo Kunstforening, Norway: GAMeC, Italy; SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway; National Museum of African Arts Smithsonian Institute, US; the Rauma Biennale, Finland; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany; Museum Berardo Collection, Portugal; la Biennale di Venezia, 2009; Sydney Biennale 2008; Manifesta 7; the Sharjah Biennial 8th, 11th and 14th editions, as well as the biennales in Sao Paulo, 2016; Shanghai, 2016; Lyon, 2017; the Bucharest Biennale, 2021, Fellbach triennial 2022.
She co-founded Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA) in 2014 as an artist-initiated non-profit library, research centre and collective/collaborative platform for reflections and an experimental think-tank, exploring histories (colonial histories, social and political histories and their legacies) and how they relate to language and contemporary art.