Anawana Haloba – interview

‘With everything that’s going on in the world, we talk about things, but we really don’t listen’

At Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Haloba (b 1978, Livingstone, Zambia; lives and works between Livingstone and Oslo, Norway) has staged an “experimental opera”, as she terms this continuing strand of research: using the format of a classical, European cultural phenomenon to interrogate its relationship with older, folkloric versions from her Zambian homeland, and questioning that European assumption of superiority over these more ancient forms. Called How to (Re) Pair My Grandmother’s Basket; An Experimental Opera (initially 2021, this version 2025), she places assorted objects – simple, everyday items, primarily horns, but also baskets and calabash – around a low stage. Spoken monologues and songs emerge from speakers placed inside each object in a choreographed incantation, from a libretto devised by Haloba. The work is described as “a dialogue among non-gendered characters who traverse geographies, cultures and societies, that speaks to our times”. Drawing on memories embedded in oral traditions, the statements and declamations have an arresting, universal quality. Her father’s recorded voice is present, in a celebration of timeless oral traditions, songs and ceremonies. She says here: “Life in itself is an operatic happening: because it has love, it has tragedy, it has different things happening at each point in one’s life.”

Anawana Haloba, installation view, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Artes Mundi 11, 2025-26. Photo: Rolant Davis.

In her interview, she references the Nigerian poet, playwright and 1986 Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who said he was attuned to opera through experiencing the drama and exuberance of Nigerian marketplaces. From her own Zambian childhood experience, she says: “The operas we have are performed when there is a funeral, or a memorial. But because they talk about history, they become forms of knowledge dissemination. They sing about things that happened thousands of years ago. They are a way of archiving knowledge. And make human beings perform as archives themselves.”

For her presentation at Cardiff’s National Museum, she brought a version of an earlier work, Listening Stations, this time with four terracotta clay vessels, placed on stands at head height, enticing the listener to lean in and hear the “insights of scribbled poetry … reflecting what is going on in the world now … The viewer is supposed to put their face in the bowl for them to hear. To have a conversation in their mind.”

Anawana Haloba, installation view, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Artes Mundi 11, 2025-26. Photo: Rolant Davis.

Haloba is associate professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She is studying for a PhD at the University of Bergen. She has exhibited at Centre Pompidou, National Museum of African Arts (Smithsonian), the Venice Biennale (2009) and the Sharjah Biennial (editions 08, 11 and 14). She had work in the recent Berlin Biennale (2025) and has a major solo show forthcoming at the National Museum, Oslo.

Artes Mundi 11, 2025
Anawana Haloba, National Museum Cardiff and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales
24 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY