Artist Libita Sibungu was commissioned by Radar to develop the work Deep Recovery (2023). As part of the initial research for this work, she visited the British Geological Survey archive at Keyworth, Nottinghamshire. The archive reflects the organisation’s colonial history, containing details of its many overseas operations through which potentially valuable mineral resources across the globe were meticulously mapped and recorded. Deep Recovery continues Sibungu's ongoing research into mining and its connections both with a wider colonial history and her own family history across Cornwall and Namibia. Responding to her immediate location in Penzance, Sibungu's research focused on granite; considering its magmic formation and connections to ritual practices in counterpoint to the processes of scientific categorisation demanded by the archive. You can read more about Deep Recovery here.  

Libita also worked with Radar on a connected project, a British Council funded collaboration between Radar and Johannesburg-based Visual Arts Network South Africa, as part of which Sibungu co-curated - with Johannesburg-based artist Mkutaji Wa Nija -  a programme of talks by South African and Namibian artists which revealed the multifaceted ways in which personal and state archives surface and transform within their work. 

 

Bio: 

Libita Sibungu (b.1987, Cornwall) lives and works in West Penwith. She is a multidisciplinary artist drawing on her British-Cornish-Namibian heritage to make discursive works that explore the entangled personal histories, and colonial legacies inscribed in the body and land. Sibungu employs sound, performance, photography, and installation — as a way to usher subversive pathways into the present through reimagining materiality, movement, and collective healing in relation to the environment. 

Sibungu is the recipient of both the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Future Foundation awards (2022). Selected exhibitions have been with; Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2023); Sonsbeek, Netherlands, and Temple Bar Gallery, Ireland, (2021); Gasworks, London, and Spike Island, Bristol, (2019).