Nicola Brandt is a Namibian-born artist. Her cross-disciplinary work explores the entangled legacies of colonialism and exploitative capitalism and their impact on the environment, identity, and memory cultures she grew up in.

Brandt’s work featured as part of intergovernmental talks between Namibia and Germany. She is currently working on a photo book, which reflects on her photographic, video, and installation work created over the past ten years since the removal of the ‘Reiterdenkmal’ – a German colonial monument in the centre of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Her upcoming body of work looks at related themes pertaining to landscapes of power in connection to extraction, capital, desire, and ruination. 

Brandt is the author of the monograph Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art published with Bloomsbury in 2020. She has contributed to publications including The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020), co-edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole and the reader of the 13th Edition of the Bamako Biennale (2022). 

She is the founder and series editor of the artists’ and writers’ residency Conversations Across Place (CaP), which provides a publishing platform for artists and writers engaging with landscape in the broader sense of geography, ecology, space, place, built and ‘natural’ environments. The first CaP volume (2021) is published with Greenbox Publishing in Berlin. 

The artist holds a doctorate in Fine Art from the University of Oxford and is currently based between Germany and Namibia. 

Exhibitions

  • 2022 Good Neighbours, Nirox Foundation, South Africa Freiburg und Kolonialismus: Gestern? Heute!, Städtische Museen Freiburg
  • 2021 Territories Under My Skin, curated by Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Jaro Straub and Ella Ziegler, The Changing Room, Berlin, Germany
  • 2020–2021 Landscapes, National Art Gallery of Namibia
  • 2020 From Where Do We Speak? Frans Nambinga Arts Training Centre, Havana, Windhoek
  • 2019 The Burden of Memory: Considering German Colonial History in Africa, curated by Rose Jepkorir, Princess Marilyn Douala Manga-Bell and Nontobeko Ntombela, Yaounde, Cameroon, Goethe Institute, Hannah Ryggen Triennial: Faig Ahmed, Alighiero e Boetti, Nicola Brandt, Alexandra Kehayoglou, Lise Bjørne Linnert, Ahmed Umar + Hannah Ryggen, curated by Solveig Lønmo. Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Norway. Award: Best Exhibition
  • 2019  The Artists Association, Oslo
  • 2018–2019 Ovizire ∙ Somgu: From Where Do We Speak?, curated by Johanna Wild and Bisrat Negassi, The MARRK Museum & M. Bassy, Hamburg, Germany
  • 2018 Tomorrows/ Today, curated by Tumelo Mosaka, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, South Africa
    Namibia. The Art of a Young Generation, Museum Würth, Erstein, Alsace, France
  • 2017 Another Antipodes: Urban Axis, PS Art Space, Fremantle, Australia
  • 2016 Kunst Einer Jungen Generation, Museum Würth, Künzelsau, Germany Mo(ve)ments: African Digital Subjectivities, Yale School of Art, Yale University, Yale, New Haven
  • 2015 Land Matters in Art, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) & the Namibian Ministry of Land Reform, St. Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche, Berlin-Mitte Christoph Schlingensief & Nicola Brandt, Unrecounted: Historical Amnesia in Germany and Namibia, Filmgalerie 451 and the National Art Gallery of Namibia, Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, Palazzo Pisani, Venice Re-presenting Photography in Namibia, Annual Visual Art Museum Programme (AVAMP), Windhoek
  • 2014 The Earth Inside, curated by Vid Simoniti, National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek
  • 2012 Namibia: Definitions of Space, London Festival of Architecture 2012, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, London In Site: Art as a Mode of Enquiry, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
  • 2011 Fuori Campo, Galleria Fuori Campo, Piazza del Campo, Siena, Italy Wlotzkasbaken, International Photography Festival, Galleria Edieuropa, Rome

Grants, Residencies and awards

  • 2017–2018 Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellowship
  • 2017 Leverhulme Trust (shortlisted), Oxford's Humanities Division & Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford Diversifying Portraiture, Vice-Chancellor's Diversity Fund, University of Oxford
  • 2016 IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) Wellcome Trust: Participant in Seed Award in Humanities and Social Science
  • 2014 Namibian Film and Theatre Awards: Indifference, Special Mention of the Jury
  • 2010–2014 Christ Church, University of Oxford, Hugh Pilkington Scholarship

Guns & Rain on Artsy

Visit Artsy

Artworks available for sale

Visit Shop Enquire