Kiluanji Kia Henda’s photographs record futuristic architecture in the Angolan capital Luanda. But Kia Henda, whose early work stood in the long tradition of southern African documentary photography, re-interprets these post-colonial buildings as ‘evidence’ for the first African journey to the sun. Fireworks over a football stadium become the dazzling light of igniting rockets; the unfinished mausoleum of Agostinho Neto, the leader of the independence movement and first Angolan president from 1975 to 1979, becomes a spacecraft; and a derelict Brutalist cinema becomes a space observatory. The mausoleum (which holds Neto’s corpse, prepared by experts from Moscow’s Lenin Mausoleum) refers directly to the Space Race between world powers during the Cold War. After gaining independence, the former Portuguese colony was supported by the Soviet Union. Kia Henda’s Icarus 13 suggests that Angola has interiorised the Soviet cosmos utopia – albeit with a dark undertone. Indeed, the country’s meteoric rise in the wake of the recent oil boom might lead it near, too near to the sun and end up causing its downfall. (Inke Arns)