Ngamba pathway / Trajet Ngamba

This event includes a 45-minute walk through Liverpool. Some parts of the walk have uneven access and may require assistance. It will be possible to join the end of the walk at The Black-E and then attend the artist talk.

The artist talk element of the event will be seated. There will be a BSL interpreter for the talk on 7 June.

If you have any access requirements, please share this on the registration form when booking your free ticket. Additionally, if you’d like to speak to our access lead before the event, please get in touch with access@biennial.com.

Pathway Ngamba references Congolese ancestral uses of palm oil through Kikumbi, an ancestral fertility ritual in the Kingdom of Kongo that initiates young women in the organisation of family and social structures. During Kikumbi, a balm made of palm oil and red clay is applied on the body. Until today in many regions of Congo, mothers rub palm oil on their babies’ spine to confer protection, strength, and blessings to the newborn.

In Ngamba's performance she creates a personal version of Kikumbi while seeking to establish a dialogue between this ancestral ritual and the contemporary urban space of Liverpool, which has been developed and enriched by the trade of palm oil. After the abolition of slavery, palm oil became Britain’s main trading interest in West and Central Africa. Used in machinery, and in the manufacturing of food, cosmetics and soap, palm oil generated incredible wealth. Liverpool merchants used their contacts through the slave trade to develop this trade which they later monopolised. William Lever had oil palm plantations in Congo.

Responding to the context of Liverpool, Ngamba brings together two foundational materials of the city: sandstone and palm oil. Sandstone as a geological foundation and palm oil as a financial foundation.

Using a mixture of palm oil, sandstone powder and other herbs to cover her body, Ngamba makes this connection and history visible to the public. In her performance, the act of offering people to embrace them, leaving the red mark of this mixture on them, is a starting point to acknowledge the presence of Congo in the DNA of the city of Liverpool.

The performance coincides with the opening of the Liverpool Biennial 2025, in which a work by Ngamba entitled CERVEAU 2 (2019) maps the traces of natural materials extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo from colonial times until today.

This performance results from a research and engagement project called Congo-Liverpool Routes developed through a collaboration between Tate Liverpool and the International Slavery Museum. The project engaged with museum collections and archival material that attest to the historical and present-day connections between Congo and Liverpool. It was developed with Congolese communities in Liverpool in rethinking the legacies of past exploitation while imagining roadmaps for different futures.

Hadassa Ngamba is an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, based between Brussels and Boma. Growing up and living in Boma (the prototype of Congolese industrialisation) and Lubumbashi (large mining city in the Haut-Katanga region), she has always been interested in Congo’s cartography in her work. Her research focuses particularly on the legacies of the slave and colonial trades on the country’s contemporary cartography and social, political and economic configurations. In 2019 Ngamba was artist in residence at WIELS Brussels. Her work is in the collections of S.M.A.K. in Gand (BE), IKOB in Eupen (BE), the National Bank of Belgium in Brussels (BE), and the Morgan Stanley Bank in New York (USA).