Martin White

Martin White is an artist based in Oslo, who was born on unceded Gadigal and Dharug lands in Sydney, Australia. White works with complex archival material, contextualising it, annotating it, narrativizing it and distributing it. White invites audiences into these stories that interrogate legacies, histories, ideologies and national identity narratives using film, performance, video, remix, print, intervention and publication.

Martin Whites work The Souls of White Folk deeply examines a specific case of solidarity from The Namibia Association in Elverum – a small industrial town in Norway – to Namibia’s independence organisation, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Established in 1980, Namibia Association went on to become one of the most important Non-Government Organisations to Namibian independence. So important, that when Namibia achieved independence in 1990 and SWAPO formed its first government, more than half of the ministers of that government had at some point visited Elverum. In telling this story, this lecture performance shows the ways that SWAPO used the resources of The Namibia Association to develop counter-strategies of resistance to the apartheid regime under which Namibia was controlled.

The context for this solidarity between the Namibia Association and Namibia’s independence movement SWAPO stretches back to 1842, when Hans Christian Knudsen, Norway’s first missionary to Africa, travelled as a representative of the German Lutheran Rhenish Mission Society to Namibia. The Rhenish Missionaries in Namibia paved the way for the German Colonisation of Namibia between 1884 and 1915 during which time the Second Reich executed a genocide of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia.

This was the first genocide of the 20th Century. 80% of the Herero population were murdered.

Namibia was a key site in the development of eugenics, with Francis Galton exploring and adventuring there, collecting material that he would use in the development of his eugenic theories, developing the ideas published by his cousin, Charles Darwin into what we now call social Darwinism. German scientist Eugen Fischer also collected data and samples in Namibia, using extensive measurements of populations in Namibia and grave robbing. Fischer sent deinterred skulls to various institutions in Germany. The development of this eugenic belief system wan an attempt to justify the exploitation by Europe of Africa and Africans that was already ocurring. This ideology eventually reached its apotheosis with Nazi Germany’s European colonisation.

In the late 19th Century, Norway was a pioneer of industrial whaling, which brought Norwegian industry to the coast of Namibia. The industry nearly hunted whales to extinction in the waters off the coasts of Africa. In 1947, at the age of 17 Sam Nujoma, future leader of Namibia’s independence organisation SWAPO and future president of independent Namibia got a job at a Norwegian Whaling Station at Walvis Bay, on Namibia’s coast.

From being cast in these relationships as subject, as occupied, as other, as resource, as forced or cheap labour, Namibia, via SWAPO, were able to flip the script and generate more and more support and action from Norway, which they did through the savvy diplomacy of leader Sam Nujoma who invoked narratives appealing directly to Norway’s National Identity.

Martin White is a current PhD fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts where he also undertook his MFA (2017) and is a graduate of RMIT University in Melbourne (2014), and Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne (2003). Recent solo exhibitions include Big Science: Volume 1 at KHÅK (2024) and at UKS (2023), Is This OK? at Oslo Kunstforening (2019) and Dust Biter at Tokonoma at Melk (2018).

Martin White’s work has been included in Project Anywhere (2023), Høstutstillingen at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2021), Free Your Modernity at UKS, Oslo (2018) and Making Sense Together at Norsk Teknisk Museum, Oslo (2017). Prior to his life as a visual artist, White directed performance, film, and television. He also writes, alongside researching and teaching.