Catherine mckinley, gallatin ma
MARCH 11TH – MARCH 27TH, 2016
Curatorial Statement
In 1884, present-day Namibia was annexed under German colonial rule as part of what was to become South West Africa. Within a decade, German imperial troops were installed to enforce state rule, provoking formidable resistance by the dominant Herero and Namaqua people. The German army responded with a campaign to remove the groups from their ancestral lands, marking the start of the German-Herero War (1904-1907). By the war’s end, an estimated eighty percent of the population, including Himba and other peoples, had been killed by the Germans. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century and a chilling rehearsal for later Nazi atrocities.
The German-Herero War centered on the enormous profitability of both human bodies and cattle skins. What played out on the “native” body through acts of labor exploitation and racial cleansing also deeply implicated sartorial, social-cultural, and traditional religious values of the Herero and Himba, in particular. The cow, the human body, and God were considered to be one and the same. “Herero-ness” and other clan identities, the sustaining of cattle wealth, and custom were expressed in large measure by a literal embodiment of the cow. Cow ownership, as well as a particular wearing of skins, and a feminine ideal of “walking like a cow,” were set off by sartorial forms that celebrated the cow’s form and bored majesty and its associated dowry wealth.
In Namibia, fashions of the Herero and their closely related clan cousins, the Himba, become monuments to the genocide which has otherwise been almost entirely erased. Both groups—summoning the body of the cow—whether with Western imported cloth and notions, skins, and “nakedness,” express radically different relationships to Victorian colonial legacies. They also express pleasure in Western and contemporary design and form, while marking a decided resistance to colonialism and the violence enacted on women’s bodies through genocide and racial cleansing.
Conflict and Skin exams the politics and colonial legacies of Namibian fashion, particularly as iterations of “national costume” and notions of “indigeneity” —the practice of indigenous culture despite colonial impositions.
How does the legacy of genocide explain the staying power of these radically different but kindred forms? How do they radicalize, vulgarize, and provide distance from the genocide?
Engaging the work of the late award-winning South African photographer Thabiso Sekgala and Ghanaian-American couture designer Mimi Plange’s Herero-inspired collection “Flower in the Desert” (Spring 2012), Conflict and Skin examines contemporary African photography and dressmaking, as well as images and costume from the archive. Through these dresses and fashion, I hope to show the legacy of colonialism and to demonstrate the resistance and trauma of the Herero people.
-Catherine Mckinley
