Ina Nian, b. 1992 – is a conceptual artist based in Malmö, Sweden. They have created a method called Black Noise which lets them explore another side of the art world, the one that is often erased but not imperceptible, depending on which frequency you’re able to perceive. They use Black Noise as a guideline in their research process, which involves critical theory, history and archive material. They are currently doing site-specific research focused on Sweden’s colonial iron trade history, as part of an ongoing long term project.

Lagos Studio Archives (Karl Ohiri (b. 1983, London, UK) and Riikka Kassinen (b. 1979, Kemi, Finland) is a multidisciplinary project and living archive dedicated to preserving and reactivating overlooked histories of studio photography across West Africa. Through exhibitions, research, and collaborations, the project explores the aesthetics, politics, and social worlds captured in studio portraiture from the mid-20th century to the present. With a focus on Lagos as a cultural and photographic hub, the archive situates local histories within broader diasporic and postcolonial narratives. Lagos Studio Archives is committed to centering African authorship and memory in the telling of visual histories. 

Archives of Becoming unravels the fragility and instability of both memory and time. These photographs, salvaged studio portraits whose surfaces have been transformed by chemical decay, mold, and weather seem to hover between presence and disappearance. The works are ghostly and luminous; faces blur into swirls of pigment, identities dissolve into abstraction. Yet it is precisely in this in-between space that they gain potency. They are not just documents of people once photographed, but meditations on what it means to try to hold on to something, to a history, to an image, to a life. There is tenderness in the damage, a strange kind of beauty in the entropy. They present the archive as a living thing, vulnerable to time, climate, and neglect. The decay in the photographs isn’t just physical, it’s political. It gestures toward the infrastructures that fail to protect certain histories, especially those outside of dominant Western institutions.

Santiago Mostyn is an artist whose practice foregrounds narrative entanglements in pursuit of new understandings of place, both in a cultural and psychic sense. Mostyn has long been interested in the interplay of music, narrative, and the embodied self, with works manifesting as films, exhibitions, and curatorial projects.

At Radcliffe, Mostyn is developing an expanded film script that reimagines the events of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) from the perspective of three revolutionary educators, building a narrative from this historical moment of Black radicalism that presages contemporary struggles for political self-determination.

Mostyn received a BA from Yale University and an MA from the Royal Institute of Art, in Stockholm. His recent exhibitions include After the Sun—Forecasts from the North at Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2024); The Threshold Is a Prism (2023) at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, in Stockholm; Mare Amoris | Sea of Love (2023) at UQ Art Museum, in Meanjin/Brisbane; Dream One (2022) at Södertälje Konsthall, in Sweden; The Show Is Over (2022) at the South London Gallery; 08-18 (Past Perfect) (2022) at Gerðarsafn Art Museum, in Kópavogur, Iceland; and The Real Show (2022) at CAC Brétigny, in France. Mostyn cocurated The Moderna Exhibition 2018: With the Future Behind Us, a survey of contemporary Swedish art, and was a resident at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2021) and a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2022, 2024).

Sasha Huber (b. 1975) is a Helsinki-based internationally recognised visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber’s work is concerned with the politics of memory, care and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations.

Huber also usurps the staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics and the possibility of repair, symbolically stitching colonial
wounds together.

She holds an MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD in artistic research at the Zurich University of the Arts. Huber also works in a creative partnership with visual artist Petri Saarikko. From 2021–24 her work has been touring under the title “You Name It” which was circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

Sheida Soleimani (f. 1990, Indianapolis, Bandaríkin) er íransk-amerísk listakona sem vinnur þvert á miðla með ljósmyndum, skúlptúr og pólitískri ádeilu. Hún dregur innblástur úr eigin bakgrunni í sögu fjölskyldu sinnar af lífi í pólitískri útlegð. Í verkum sínum setur hún upp flókin sjónræn svið þar sem hún gagnrýnir ofbeldi af hálfu ríkisins, mannréttindabrot og samsekt Vesturlanda. Með kraftmiklu myndmáli, sem einkennist af brotum og táknrænni háðsádeilu, beinist athyglin að því hvernig fjölmiðlar móta og skekkja frásagnir frá Miðausturlöndum. Soleimani umbreytir sögulegum tímalínum með því að setja atburði úr samhengi, brjóta upp vestrænar frásagnir og skapa rými fyrir aðrar, oft þaggaðar, sögur um íranska sjálfsmynd, dreifingu og pólitískt ofbeldi.

Verkið Ghostwriter er áköf og óttalaus könnun á persónulegum og pólitískum áföllum – þar sem viðfangsefnið er hin ómögulega tilraun að þýða vitnisburð í mynd og þögn í form. Röðin byggir á viðtölum sem Soleimani tók við móður sína, fyrrum pólitískan fanga sem varð fyrir ofsóknum í byltingunni í Íran 1979. Með handgerðum sviðsmyndum, efni úr skjalasöfnum og táknum sem vísa til pyntinga, flótta og mótspyrnu skapar hún sjónrænar klippimyndir sem eru bæði sviðsettar og sársaukafullar í raunsæi sínu. Verkið vekur spurningar um það hver hefur rétt til að segja söguna, hver ber afleiðingar hennar og hvernig minningar virka þegar skjalasafnið er munnlegt, brotið eða bælt niður. Í Ghostwriter er engin lausn, enginn endir í sátt – en afl felst í sjálfri frásögninni og endurtekningunni.