There is a room inside an abandoned courthouse in Berlin.
Once part of a military prison complex on Lehrter Straße, the building holds its own archive. The bricks are darkened by weather, bullet holes are visible on the facade, and the corridors are thick with an inherited silence. It is here, in this structure marked by imperial history, that Helena Uambembe’s How to Make a Mud Cake is installed for the 13th Berlin Biennale. And it is here that the work gathers a particular charge. The histories it invokes are not abstract. They are personal, material, and often refused recognition by the archive.
At the centre of the installation is a video in which Uambembe appears as a host. The format is familiar. It resembles a cooking show. But the tone is flat, dry, intentionally dissonant. “The more creative with your trauma, the better,” she says. The line lands with a mix of irony and indictment. What unfolds is not a recipe in any conventional sense. Soil is sifted and shaped like batter. Mud is folded into form with bare hands. A warning is delivered mid-way: “Make sure not to cut yourself, but if you do, it adds to your life story.” Here, performance and memory blend into a ritual that feels both deliberate and unresolved.
Uambembe’s work does not dramatise personal history. It draws it out slowly, layer by layer, through gesture, repetition, and presence. Born in South Africa to Angolan parents, she is the daughter of a soldier who served in the 32 Battalion. This was a unit made up largely of Angolan fighters who had been conscripted into the apartheid-era South African Defence Force. That history is often overlooked. In Uambembe’s hands, it becomes a living substance. It is not treated as spectacle. It is processed through fabric, clay, video, and installation. These are not metaphors. They are methods.
In What You See is Not What You Remember, which won her the 2022 Baloise Art Prize, Uambembe reconstructed the fragments of her childhood home in Pomfret. The work evokes a space shaped by exile and estrangement. Doilies were crocheted with care. Teapots were arranged for guests who never arrived. Furniture sat in rooms that no longer belonged to anyone. These objects were treated as evidence of a life in motion. On the walls and surfaces, phrases were written in cursive: “freedom,” “I think I remember,” “He who has no stomach for this fight, let him depart.” The installation moved between childhood memory and adult reckoning, creating a space where the past was never quite settled.
What drives Uambembe’s practice is not nostalgia. It is a refusal to accept the absence of her history in national narratives. When she visited the South African National Museum of Military History, she described her frustration. “Oh my word,” she said, “it left me so frustrated how white the space is.” For her, the museum’s silences were a reminder of how the official record often fails those whose lives fall outside its frame. This disconnect between personal memory and public record is what animates her work.
Inside the Berlin courthouse, that disconnect becomes even more visible. The building itself carries the weight of a state that used architecture to discipline, contain, and erase. There is a covered walkway connecting two wings of the complex, often called a bridge of sighs. It once carried prisoners from one side of the institution to the other. Against this backdrop, Uambembe’s installation introduces another kind of passage. Through performance, she brings her history into a space that once denied others the right to be heard. Through humour and repetition, she interrupts the silence.
How to Make a Mud Cake is not a call for empathy. It does not translate pain into something digestible. Instead, it asks what it means to inherit trauma, and to carry it without apology. The mud cake is not meant to be eaten. It is a form of witness. It reminds us that some histories do not disappear simply because they are inconvenient.
Here, inside the brick walls of a forgotten courthouse, Uambembe holds those stories in view. They remain unfinished. They remain alive.