The Other in Kiluanji Kia Henda: Shakespeare and Camões revisited

The work of the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda has been characterized from the outset by intertextuality, which he uses as a means of conveying the complex entanglement of symbolic and historical tensions that relations between Africa and Europe have always carried with them, not only during the long centuries of colonization but also in the post-colonial present. These reflections are crucially informed by the artist’s own experience: in the early years of his career he was selected to participate in several artistic residencies on the European continent and it was during the first one, which took place in the city of Venice in 2010, that he began to create pieces that directly call into question the relationship of Europe with the continent that for centuries it has considered its own Other – a critique carried out from the soil of Europe itself. The chapter presents an analysis of Kiluanji Kia Henda’s works The merchant of Venice (2010) and Othello’s Fate (2013), respectively a photographic portrait and a series of tableau-vivant photographs that can be considered cross-cultural and transmedial adaptations of William Shakespeare’s dramas, and The Isle of Venus (2018), an installation whose title refers to Os Lusíadas by Luís Vaz de Camões. This analysis will clarify how these three classical, Renaissance literary texts echo in the three contemporary artworks, focusing particularly on the reinterpretation of the theme of the ethnic and cultural Other that they engage with. My aim is to understand how, in our post-imperial contemporaneity, the universalisation of European cultural referents, and within these of the literary canon, provides an “inversion of the gaze” (Kandjimbo 2010) that enables the historical Other – in this case, an African artist – to contribute to the interpretation and definition of what Europe’s present is.