10 may 2026 — Fantastic Forest of Fungi
Residency of the research and creation in the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) at High‑Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)
Resulting in the development of a new work, the outcomes of which were presented at theGATE festival. Stuttgart - DE
21 april – 31 july 2026 — TheGATE Festival +
African Inteligence
In collaboration with the High‑Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). Stuttgart - DE
Soul Distillation
Hybrid Lab of the Technische Universität Berlin and the Universität der Künste.
Metropolis M
'Ik doe het voor het publiek', Hadassa Ngamba over Configurations bij CC Strombeek
The New York Times
On the Frontier, the Lubumbashi Biennial Makes Art From Obstacles
Published on Dec. 15, 2019 (Mentioned her use of cartography)
Glean ART
'We zijn een punt tussen twee richtingen: er kan iets nieuws komen' - Phillip Van den Bossche
Harper's BAZAAR
Five female artists to see at this year’s Liverpool Biennial
By Marie-Claire Chappet, published on June 6th, 2025
Critica De Arte Diante Das Crisis Actuais
Cartografia, abstração e histórias: Hadassa Ngamba (R.D. Congo) e Mark Bradford (EUA)
Observer
The 13th Liverpool Biennial Celebrates a Vibrant World-City
By Farah Abdessamad, published on June 28, 2025
TV5 Monde
Hadassa Ngamba : l'artiste et l'extraction du Cuivre
Africa News
Sonsbeek biennale festival kicks-off after one year delay
Bruzz International
Artist Hadassa Ngamba : ' I havent't cut my hair in five years'
For a detailed CV see here.
Born in 1993 in Kizu, Democratic Republic of Congo, Hadassa Ngamba's practice unfolds as a dialogue between art, science, history, and ancestral knowledge systems. Moving across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media, including XR, she explores the intertwined themes of power, memory, and reciprocity.
Ngamba's investigative approach is shaped by an unconventional background in criminology at the University of Lubumbashi — a training that taught her to read hidden systems, trace evidence, and look beneath surfaces. Her early Cerveau and Perspective series carried this forensic attention into her own family history and the colonial history of Congo, confronting enduring legacies while envisioning futures grounded in justice. Her subsequent training at HISK in Ghent — the Higher Institute for Fine Arts — deepened this direction: contemporary art, she understood, could continue the work of investigation, conducted in the open, exposing what systems of authority prefer to keep hidden.
This forensic mindset directly dictates her choice of medium. Ngamba often paints with minerals — malachite, cassiterite, cobalt, heterogenite, aragonite, calcite, ochres, iron oxides, bitumen — drawn directly from the earth, carrying geological memory and cultural weight accumulated over centuries. Her canvases are composed of the same substances that have coloured ritual objects, marked bodies, and made ground sacred across generations of Central African life. Cerveau II, exhibited at Tate Liverpool, established this distinct material language. This choice is neither incidental nor purely aesthetic. In a moment when the world is renegotiating access to critical minerals — cobalt, lithium, coltan — her pigments quietly reframe the conversation, rendering the complex histories of global extraction legible on the canvas.
Her practice moves fluidly between the scientific, the ceremonial, the economic, and the immersive — each a different medium for the same enquiry. Following a visit to CERN, she began her Feynman Lithography Series, merging diagrams of elementary particles physics with royal Mphoo headdresses from the ancient Kongo kingdoms. This juxtaposition brings together two symbolic systems mapping invisible forces: one tracking the interactions of physical matter, the other tracking the lines of ancestral lineage and spiritual authority.
Performance serves as the conduit for this ceremonial knowledge, demonstrated in her staging of the Kikumbi initiation ritual at the Liverpool Biennial, which brought Central African sacred traditions onto one of Europe's most prominent contemporary art platforms.
Ngamba extends her inquiry naturally into real-world economic systems. Reciprocity is the organising principle running through everything she makes. Her ongoing project Trajet Ngamba — Pathway Ngamba — translates this principle into a tangible methodology, reactivating historical African trade routes through collaborations such as the Trajet Ngamba Coffee Edition, developed with Bamiléké dignitaries. Through this initiative, trade routes are re-imagined as relational networks—human circuits where value flows in continuous circulation rather than one-way extraction.
This model of relational networks maps directly from human systems into the natural world. For Ngamba, fungi serve as a symbol for reciprocity. She has created bronze sculptures of fungi with craftsmen in Cameroon, grounding this symbol in material form. At the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, the same logic scales into an immersive Fantastic Forest of Fungi — a digital environment you can stand inside and feel.
Her new Living Atlas of African Knowledge extends this network thinking into cultural memory, reimagining historical preservation as a living, associative archive. It is, at its core, an act of African Intelligence —a mode of knowing that holds oral histories, physical artefacts, ancestral myths, living crafts, and sacred rituals together by their relationships rather than their categories.
For Ngamba, the individual artwork is never an isolated object. Whether working with raw minerals, live performance, or high-performance computation, she is constructing a singular body of work rendered across different scales.
Text by Ralph Dum
10 may 2026 — Fantastic Forest of Fungi
Residency of the research and creation in the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) at High‑Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)
Resulting in the development of a new work, the outcomes of which were presented at theGATE festival. Stuttgart - DE
21 april – 31 july 2026 — TheGATE Festival +
African Inteligence
In collaboration with the High‑Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). Stuttgart - DE
Soul Distillation
Hybrid Lab of the Technische Universität Berlin and the Universität der Künste.
Metropolis M
'Ik doe het voor het publiek', Hadassa Ngamba over Configurations bij CC Strombeek
The New York Times
On the Frontier, the Lubumbashi Biennial Makes Art From Obstacles
Published on Dec. 15, 2019 (Mentioned her use of cartography)
Glean ART
'We zijn een punt tussen twee richtingen: er kan iets nieuws komen' - Phillip Van den Bossche
Harper's BAZAAR
Five female artists to see at this year’s Liverpool Biennial
By Marie-Claire Chappet, published on June 6th, 2025
Critica De Arte Diante Das Crisis Actuais
Cartografia, abstração e histórias: Hadassa Ngamba (R.D. Congo) e Mark Bradford (EUA)
Observer
The 13th Liverpool Biennial Celebrates a Vibrant World-City
By Farah Abdessamad, published on June 28, 2025
TV5 Monde
Hadassa Ngamba : l'artiste et l'extraction du Cuivre
Africa News
Sonsbeek biennale festival kicks-off after one year delay
Bruzz International
Artist Hadassa Ngamba : ' I havent't cut my hair in five years'
For a detailed CV see here.
Born in 1993 in Kizu, Democratic Republic of Congo, Hadassa Ngamba's practice unfolds as a dialogue between art, science, history, and ancestral knowledge systems. Moving across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media, including XR, she explores the intertwined themes of power, memory, and reciprocity.
Ngamba's investigative approach is shaped by an unconventional background in criminology at the University of Lubumbashi — a training that taught her to read hidden systems, trace evidence, and look beneath surfaces. Her early Cerveau and Perspective series carried this forensic attention into her own family history and the colonial history of Congo, confronting enduring legacies while envisioning futures grounded in justice. Her subsequent training at HISK in Ghent — the Higher Institute for Fine Arts — deepened this direction: contemporary art, she understood, could continue the work of investigation, conducted in the open, exposing what systems of authority prefer to keep hidden.
This forensic mindset directly dictates her choice of medium. Ngamba often paints with minerals — malachite, cassiterite, cobalt, heterogenite, aragonite, calcite, ochres, iron oxides, bitumen — drawn directly from the earth, carrying geological memory and cultural weight accumulated over centuries. Her canvases are composed of the same substances that have coloured ritual objects, marked bodies, and made ground sacred across generations of Central African life. Cerveau II, exhibited at Tate Liverpool, established this distinct material language. This choice is neither incidental nor purely aesthetic. In a moment when the world is renegotiating access to critical minerals — cobalt, lithium, coltan — her pigments quietly reframe the conversation, rendering the complex histories of global extraction legible on the canvas.
Her practice moves fluidly between the scientific, the ceremonial, the economic, and the immersive — each a different medium for the same enquiry. Following a visit to CERN, she began her Feynman Lithography Series, merging diagrams of elementary particles physics with royal Mphoo headdresses from the ancient Kongo kingdoms. This juxtaposition brings together two symbolic systems mapping invisible forces: one tracking the interactions of physical matter, the other tracking the lines of ancestral lineage and spiritual authority.
Performance serves as the conduit for this ceremonial knowledge, demonstrated in her staging of the Kikumbi initiation ritual at the Liverpool Biennial, which brought Central African sacred traditions onto one of Europe's most prominent contemporary art platforms.
Ngamba extends her inquiry naturally into real-world economic systems. Reciprocity is the organising principle running through everything she makes. Her ongoing project Trajet Ngamba — Pathway Ngamba — translates this principle into a tangible methodology, reactivating historical African trade routes through collaborations such as the Trajet Ngamba Coffee Edition, developed with Bamiléké dignitaries. Through this initiative, trade routes are re-imagined as relational networks—human circuits where value flows in continuous circulation rather than one-way extraction.
This model of relational networks maps directly from human systems into the natural world. For Ngamba, fungi serve as a symbol for reciprocity. She has created bronze sculptures of fungi with craftsmen in Cameroon, grounding this symbol in material form. At the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, the same logic scales into an immersive Fantastic Forest of Fungi — a digital environment you can stand inside and feel.
Her new Living Atlas of African Knowledge extends this network thinking into cultural memory, reimagining historical preservation as a living, associative archive. It is, at its core, an act of African Intelligence —a mode of knowing that holds oral histories, physical artefacts, ancestral myths, living crafts, and sacred rituals together by their relationships rather than their categories.
For Ngamba, the individual artwork is never an isolated object. Whether working with raw minerals, live performance, or high-performance computation, she is constructing a singular body of work rendered across different scales.
Text by Ralph Dum
