Exploring history and identity politics through the lens of those who lived in exile during Namibia’s independence war, Tuli Mekondjo works with layered, textured mixed media (embroidery, collage, paint, resin and Mahangu millet grain – a Namibian food staple). She extends this into performance, and vice versa.  Mekondjo uses photographic images from public and personal archives to revisit the wartime context of her early childhood, growing up in the exile/refugee camps of Kwanza-Sul (Angola) and Nyango (Zambia). The archival photographs act as witness to the lives of women and children whose stories have often been overlooked in prevailing masculinist and patriotic histories of the war – and a means through which the artist re-engages her past. In a similar vein her work explores photographic archives of the early colonial period in Namibia.