"My current work uses bra-making materials to reform and recontextualize the aesthetics of these materials and their inherent assumptions. These materials are heavily associated with “unmentionables,” garments which are intimate and usually unseen, worn under more acceptable clothing. I am exploring an aesthetic of the tangible qualities of these substances: their stretch, their shine, their color, and the warping, molding, or other structure they reveal when combined in new ways. I create fabrics from elastics stitched together, and allow wires, boning, and channeling to dictate shapes for the textile around them, rather than to conform fabric to externally determined body shapes. I view the labor and actions of making these pieces as a performance of reclaiming and reimagining heretofore externally determined, corporatized, generic standards of beauty, femininity, and shape that have been foisted on women and then presumed to be intimate and hidden. I use these materials to shape and delineate space through tension, compression, and framing as a semblance of forces shaping decisions in women’s lives. Materials that mold prescribed female forms are removed from bodies and employed in exhibition spaces to instead shape the wall and the aesthetic arena. Meanwhile, the female form is absent from the site, inverting the legacy of venerating the canonized female figure that excludes women creators from the dialogue. The adaptable, flexible, off-kilter nature of the individual pieces reflects acts of absorbing and contorting. The fluctuating bodily experience of a mother navigates between the physical havoc of childbearing/rearing and a recovered femininity. These pieces explore the aesthetics of reclaiming ownership and the performance of display. The adjustable hardware, modular attachments, straps placed in tension, forms stretched, and materials twisted and drooped are analogous to ways that women, mothers, and their bodies interrelate."
LIA Portraits w/ Maria Samuelson
Daniela Ponomarevová is a visual artist and drawer whose work combines drawing, painting, objects, installation, and text. She employs original, post-conceptual approaches, including analyses and assembly instructions for individual works. Since 2024, she has been a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts BUT in Brno. In 2025, she became a finalist for the Critics’ Award for Young Painting. Daniela explores the imagery of fairground attractions, “advertising smog,” and digital “attention grabbers” that encompass a wide spectrum of visual representations: from TikTok videos, reality shows, and food porn to B-movie horror comedies, Hollywood films, and IKEA paintings. She understands all these images as “symptoms” of a contemporary culture obsessed with attention. She conceives the funfair as an existential metaphor for today’s world: an environment of permanent saturation, visual competition, and inequality. Based on this research, she develops her concept of the Post-Fairground Attraction. These are hybrid works; drawings and objects that reflect how fairground aesthetic and performative principles spill over into contemporary media and public space in the form of residual signs. Within a gallery setting, these works function as ambivalent objects representing three levels of meaning: a contemporary critical work, an empty backdrop, and a pleasing attraction that is simultaneously comical and unsettling. Rather than mimicking reality, Daniela revives it in a new “version on steroids”: distorted and bloated to such an extent that it can no longer be watched.
LIA Portraits w/ Daniela Ponomarevová
Gazellah Bruder is a highly accomplished and internationally-known artist of Tolai and Mekeo ancestry who lives and works in Papua New Guinea (PNG). She is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, book illustrator, and textile artist, and has also worked in film and television. Her work focuses on social issues, gender, sexuality, and environmental change and she uses her art to promote dialogue about these critical issues. Bruder is particularly concerned with women’s inequality and domestic violence in Papua New Guinea. Much of her art expresses her insights into women’s experiences and their journeys in life. Countering Euro-American stereotypical depictions of the people of Melanesia—a region of Oceania that extends from Papua New Guinea and West Papua to Fiji—that long represented them as “primitive,” exoticized or eroticized caricatures, or as anthropological “types,” Bruder’s representations of Papua New Guinea women capture their personalities, experiences, and resilience. Her work has received national recognition and in 2020 the PNG government selected her and four other artists to participate in the United Nations’ initiative to produce advocacy materials to prevent and respond to violence against women.
LIA Portraits w/ Gazellah Bruder
Papua New Guinea gained independence on September 16, 1975. Fifty years later, the country is celebrating this historic anniversary with numerous cultural initiatives worldwide. WanBel is one of these projects: a global alliance of partner institutions under the motto “Celebrate our History, Inspire our Future.” https://grassi-voelkerkunde.skd.museum/en/exhibitions/reinventing-grassiskd/rapid-response/
WanBel – 50 Years of Independence: Papua New Guinea @ GRASSI Museum Leipzig
Nolwazi Mbali Mahlangu was an artist in residence at LIA programme from November 2025 until January 2026. “I am working on a performance-as-research project situated in the Herrnhut Moravian Archives, responding to histories and contemporary realities of migration through a faith-inflected lens. The work takes the form of a play/prayer/performance that interrogates what it means to pray in the language of the strange, while holding the theological provocation re rapela ka leleme la Modimo, that is: we pray in the tongue of God. Titled The Archive Arrives Tomorrow: Postkarten aus dem Süden, the performance treats the archive not as static record but as a migrating body, arriving late, speaking in fragments, demanding embodied listening. Methodologically, it draws on ritual performance and archival dramaturgy. Where prayer continues to be method and mode of resistance.”
Radio Blau Interview w/ Nolwazi Mbali Mahlangu
“I’m Marcellas Njonji, a multidisciplinary artist from Cameroon with a Bachelor’s degree in Performing and Visual Arts from the University of Bamenda, 2019. As a passionate mixed-media and performance artist, I create art that ignites social, cultural, and environmental consciousness. As a 2022 laureate of the Cameroonian Cultural Network (CCN), I’ve used my art to raise awareness about the complexities of the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon. Additionally, I’ve promoted gender equality and inclusivity through my program WOMAN’Art, which fosters the growth of female artists in Bamenda.”
LIA Portraits w/ Marcellas Njonji
“I work from memory as a living territory. My artistic practice intertwines the traces of northern Nicaragua with Mesoamerican roots that still breathe through songs, bodies, and mountains. From displacement, motherhood, and spirituality, my work seeks to transform pain into a gesture of collective healing. My practice moves between performance, sound, installations, language, and curatorial work understood as an act of care. I believe in art as a way to invoke what has no name — to listen to the voices suspended between absence and hope. In each action, the body becomes an offering, silence turns into memory, and creation opens as a space where life can speak again.”
LIA Portraits w/ Illimani de los Andes
She is a self-taught, multidisciplinary visual artist from Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Her work draws from personal experience, using art as both expression and resistance. Working with strings, nails, and acrylics in mixed media and installation, Lilian explores themes of identity, resilience, healing, and visibility. Growing up with a physical disability shaped her perspective and deepened her sensitivity to questions of belonging and representation. Through her practice, she transforms these experiences into powerful visual narratives that challenge exclusion and celebrate strength. Each piece becomes a dialogue between fragility and power, absence and presence, self and society. Her works have been exhibited locally and internationally, including at Arts and Human Rights: Conversing Multiplicities at Concordia University in Canada. She has received recognition as a Mandela Washington Fellow, Tanzanian UN Youth Fellow, Africa No Filter Cover Star, and Tanzanian Sheroe, as well as awards from the Emergent Arts Space and Mulika Tanzania Arts and Human Rights competitions. For Lilian, art is both a language and a space of healing a way to reimagine how the world sees difference and to reclaim visibility through hope, beauty, emotion, and truth.
LIA Portraits w/ Lilian Munuo
Ndako Nghipandulwa (born 1988 in Kwanza-Sul) is a Namibian visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses nail and string art, fabric art, oil and acrylic painting, murals, and mixed media works. With a style that blends precision with imagination, his work is defined by a bold engagement with texture, geometry, and narrative. Ndako’s creative path is deeply rooted in both his personal history and academic background. Originally trained in civil engineering, he developed a strong foundation in mathematics, geometry, and project management skills that continue to inform the structural and conceptual elements of his work. This technical knowledge, combined with a vivid sense of visual storytelling, allows him to produce artworks that are not only aesthetically striking but also intellectually layered and meticulously crafted. often overlooked become instruments of expression in his hands. Through deliberate tension, intricate patterning, and a meditative use of color and texture, Ndako transforms these materials into evocative forms that explore identity, experience, and perception. His pieces often blur the boundaries between craft, fine art, and design, inviting viewers to engage with both the detail and the emotion embedded within each work. Ndako has participated in several group exhibitions throughout Namibia and beyond, culminating in his first solo exhibition in 2022. He has also completed numerous commissioned works for individual collectors, businesses, and institutions, ranging from nail and string pieces to murals and live art performances. He is equally passionate about community engagement and education, having facilitated workshops and collaborative art projects that promote creative expression and technical skill development. Whether working on canvas, walls, or unconventional surfaces, Ndako approaches every project with a commitment to innovation, precision, and emotional resonance. His work is inspired by a combination of observation, lived experience, imagination, and the deep, often unspoken connections that tie us to each other and the world around us.
LIA Portraits w/ Ndako Nghipandulwa
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