Bela Rocha

Silk, memory and Mozambican rurality

Bela Rocha held her first solo exhibition in 1984, in Potsdam, Germany, having studied theatre at the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin. Living in Brazil, she developed her distinctive technique of painting on silk — work of such singular character that, in São Paulo, it crossed into haute couture. She illustrated Mia Couto's Raízes de Orvalho, and her search for anthropological and cultural references later earned her a grant from the Fundação Oriente.

Between 1995 and 1997 she exhibited across Maputo — at the Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, the Centro de Estudos Brasileiros, the Mozambican Photography Association, the Núcleo de Arte and the Instituto Camões — before a sequence of exhibitions in Portugal, including the Museu Nacional da Electricidade in Lisbon during Expo'98 and, in 2011, Culturgest — Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Lisbon.

Her painting joins irony and satire to a lyrical surrealism rooted in urban folklore and in memories of Mozambican rurality. She is represented in the National Art Museum of Mozambique, at the international headquarters of UNICEF and in collections across eleven countries. She featured in Moçambi-Cá (UCCLA, Lisbon, 2023) and lives and works in Portugal.