This year’s exhibition of the Ruhrfestspiele features Ângela Ferreira. The artist was born in 1958 in Mozambique, grew up in South Africa and resides in Lisbon today. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen will be her first solo show in Germany, after she participated as first African artist at the Venice Biennale 2007 for the Portuguese Pavillon. She was invited to numerous leading museums and exhibition spaces.
Within her works Ferreira examines the colonial and postcolonial aftermath on contemporary societies, often regarding the architectural modernism on the African continent and other important locations of European imperialism. Ferreira's sculptural, acoustic and videographic homages focus on the economic, political and cultural African history, as well as works of public figures as Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor, Jorge dos Santos, Diego Rivera or Miriam Makeba. Especially her research on Congo’s miners as well as their memories and songs concentrate inside her work “Entrer dans la mine” (2013) and takes a critical look at the tension between rich and poor, the global north and south and the resulting controversial living conditions. The exhibit invites every recipient to question and reflect on one’s own past in terms of prospective labour conditions within the global mining industry and therefore connects to the coal mining history of the Ruhrgebiet.
Ângela Ferreira's oeuvre features works from more than three decades, being brought together in a large overview show emphasizing their poetic, political and aesthetic complexity for the first time in Germany.