Nicole Rafiki
In residence: September - October 2023
Nicole Rafiki’s (b.1989) Lives and works between South Africa and Norway. Her interdisciplinary artworks move between photography and bead work, textiles and text, and the use of memorial objects old and new. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki treats art making as a practice of remembrance, healing and cultural analysis.
Her images often employ artistic strategies that avoid a western anthropological gaze. Incorporating symbolism, fables, and tools of visual storytelling and oral history, she invokes themes of forced migration and war ghosts, racialized perceptions of Blackness and femininity, and fraught colonial traditions of spatial power and temporal erasure. As a child of the Kongolese diaspora with connections in various countries in Africa and Europe, she taps into pre-colonial forms of global interconnectedness and knowledge transfer.