Ângela Ferreira

For this year's Ruhrfestspiele art exhibition, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen focuses on Ângela Ferreira, an artist born in Mozambique in 1958, who grew up in South Africa and now lives in Lisbon. She was the first African artist ever to represent Portugal at the Venice Biennale (2007) and was invited to numerous leading museums and exhibition venues worldwide. This Ângela Ferreira’s first solo exhibition in Germany. Her work explores the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on contemporary societies, often in the context of architectural modernism on the African continent and other sites of European colonization.

Ferreira's sculptural, acoustic, and videographic homages reference Africa's economic, political, and cultural history as well as works by figures such as Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor, Jorge dos Santos, Diego Rivera, and Miriam Makeba. Last but not least, her research on Congolese mine workers, their memories and songs, is condensed in the work "Entrer dans la mine" (2013). This piece also represents a link to the joint founding history of the Ruhrfestspiele and the Kunsthalle with regard to coal miners, art and theater. Ângela Ferreira's oeuvre comprises works from over three decades, which are now brought together in their poetic, political, and aesthetic complexity in a large exhibition for the first time.