NICOLA BRANDT
b. 1983, NamibiaNicola Brandt (born April 5, 1983, in Windhoek, Namibia) is a Namibian-German artist whose work examines power, landscape, and the intersections of private and public memory, tracing where these forces converge and, at times, collide. She is among the first of her generation of Namibian artists to critically engage with the memory culture and entanglements of German colonialism, National Socialism, and Apartheid, and their spatial and embodied legacies. Through documentary, performative, and post-documentary approaches, Brandt invites viewers to consider not only what is visible, but also what remains absent or obscured.
Brandt is the author of the monograph Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art (Bloomsbury, 2020). She has also contributed to numerous publications, including The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020) and the reader accompanying the 13th Edition of the Bamako Biennale (2022), co-edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole.
She is the founder and series editor of the artists’ and writers’ residency Con- versations Across Place (CaP). The first CaP volume (2021) was 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.
Brandt’s work has been presented at institutions including MAXXI Museum (Italy), Würth and MARKK Museums (Germany), the Rhodes Trust (UK), the Nirox Foundation (South Africa), and the National Art Gallery of Namibia. She holds a DPhil in Fine Art from the University of Oxford and is the author of Landscapes between Then and Now (Bloomsbury, 2020) and The Distance Within (Steidl, 2025). Her practice has contributed to diplomatic cultural dialogue, including intergovernmental talks between Namibia and Germany
Courtesy THK Gallery, Cape Town.
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