Nicola Brandt: The Distance Within
Spanning over a decade of work, The Distance Within brings together photographs and video stills by Nicola Brandt that delve into her dual heritage—German and Namibian—while challenging dominant visual narratives of Namibia. Through extensive travels across the country, Brandt has captured landscapes, people, and built environments to expose the entangled legacies of German colonialism, apartheid, and National Socialism. Her images highlight a range of historical traces, from intimate and overlooked memorials—like a crumbling pile of stones by the roadside—to state-sanctioned sites of remembrance and resistance, particularly those acknowledging colonial violence. Interwoven with these visuals are writings from scholars and thinkers in photography, postcolonial studies, memory politics, and genocide discourse, alongside materials drawn from public and private archives. This layered approach confronts persistent cultural amnesia and interrogates the frameworks through which history is seen and understood. Brandt’s work ultimately advocates for the reclamation of marginalized indigenous narratives, a critical dismantling of idealized whiteness, and the illumination of stories long left in the shadows.
About the Author
Nicola Brandt, born in Windhoek, Namibia, is of German and South African heritage. Living and working between Berlin, Windhoek, and Cape Town, she is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans large-scale photography, video, and installation. Her work engages with complex themes such as power, memory, desire, and the politics of perspective and belonging.
As part of a new generation of artists emerging from Namibia, Brandt has gained recognition for her critical reimagining of landscape and place, as well as her decolonial approach to German colonial legacies and commemorative practices. Central to her work is the idea that identity and place are deeply intertwined, shaped by environmental, historical, and sociopolitical conditions. Through expanded documentary strategies and performance, she seeks to translate these layered experiences into visual form.
Committed to art’s potential as a vehicle for dialogue and transformation, Brandt’s work was included in intergovernmental negotiations between Germany and Namibia in 2015, and later featured at the Nama and Herero Congress in Hamburg in 2018, contributing to broader conversations around historical justice and remembrance.
Brandt has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Yale University, the Würth Museum in Germany, and the Nirox Foundation in South Africa. She also teaches photography and contemporary art history and has participated in artist residencies at the MARKK Museum and the University of Hamburg, among others.
She is the author of Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art (Bloomsbury, 2020), and has contributed to numerous publications, including The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (Kerber, 2020), edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole, and the reader of the 13th Bamako Biennale (2022). Brandt is also the founder and series editor of Conversations Across Place (CAP), a residency and editorial platform that brings together artists and writers in transnational dialogue.
