A Mindful Spirit

When Liberatha Alibalio departed from Kagera, her hometown in north-western Tanzania, to attend university in Dar es Salaam, she left behind the shore of Lake Victoria, dense thickets of coffee bushes, vast fields of banana trees, and a natural landscape full of unique colors and textures. In her early works, she found a way to reach back to home and her memories of a childhood surrounded by nature, exploring colors that reminded her of the village, using natural dyes and materials such as bark cloth and tumeric. This work, she recalls now, was a way of looking for balance between her home and the city and staying close to the place she grew up in, despite the physical distance.

After graduating from the University of Dar es Salaam in 2018 and an apprenticeship learning the technology of handweaving and design, Liberatha joined the Academy for Contemporary Art and Expression at Nafasi Art Space in 2020. During the year-long programme, she experimented with performance, installation, and video art, while continuing to create detailed and intricate textile pieces that draw inspiration from quilting, abstract painting, and collage.

Her works from the Academy reflect her engagement with a range of conceptual prompts and engagements, creating pieces that vary in subject matter and theme from African liberation to mental health and wellness, and her increasing ambition in technique and style. Her free-form hand stitching in Reflection I and II with inverted color schemes and trails of softly colourful patches speaks to her experience of 2020 as a year full of “turning points, rejoicing, reflecting, relearning, releasing, reminiscing, sadness and melancholy, learning, and contemplation”.

Following her graduation from the Nafasi Academy, Liberatha participated in an experimental research residency led by curator Taonga Julia Kaseka in Mbala, Zambia focused on ancestral interpretation, which motivated her to look deeply into her own cultural heritage. Liberatha returned to her home village Ibaraizibu in the Bukoba area of Kagera in April 2021 to visit with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and spent time learning, observing, and exploring the meanings behind the practices and rituals she grew up around, but for the first time interested in how she could interpret and reflect these in her own artistic journey.

Now, Liberatha has been accepted into the competitive Modzi Arts residency in Lusaka, where she hopes to spend two months focusing on producing new work that will explore migration, movement, and the traces in language, culture and traditions left by the ancestors from her home and the region, stretching from Tanzania into Uganda, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Liberatha’s artistic approach combines attention to earthly detail with transcendental awareness, leading to work that feels both welcoming and soft as well as elevating and spiritual. Her mindful spirit in search of connection and continuity with the ancestors beckons us all to follow.

An Exhibition by Liberatha Alibalio
Curated by Rebecca Mzengi Corey
May 2021