Rehema Chachage

Rehema Chachage is a visual artist based in both Dar es Salaam/Tanzania and Vienna/Austria.

In her practice, she focuses on observing the potential power of »togetherness« in establishing conducive spaces used as a basis to create and/or recreate identities, to sharpen agency, and to preserve a sense of rootedness and belonging.

She often works collaboratively, through a form of vulnerable process-based research, with her mother (and occasionally with her grandmother). Together, they create a »performative archive« which »collects« and »organizes« stories, practices, rituals and other oral traditions in different media in an unorthodox way, resulting in performances, photography, the olfactory, video, essays and text, as well as physical installations. These have often explored the unearthing of history, space, and the body (how the body and the land remembers) via methods that employ storytelling, the matriline, alternative ways of doing and knowing, as well as other methodologies which are both embodied and instinctual.

Chachage holds a BA in Fine Art (2009) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town/South Africa and a MA in Contemporary Art Theory (2018) from Goldsmiths, University of London/United Kingdom.

She is currently finalizing her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, focusing on alternative ways of knowing/knowledge formation, specifically engaging with handed down/inherited knowledge (songs, names, recipes, building practices, healing rituals, scientific knowledge, etc.) as alternative epistemological strategies for rethinking conventional understanding and relationship to knowledge; in turn, also legitimizing these forms of knowledge as worthy of »mainstream« spaces such as educational and artistic institutions.