is a commission of eight artists based in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), working across new media, audiovisual and writing to create new works in dialogue with the work of filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, representing Great Britain at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale.
For the second edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, iniva presents Unseen Guests. The Pavilion is a series of radical re-imaginings of nationhood, reflecting on the entanglement between land and water, movement and m/otherlands, in the forging of new identities and subjectivities.
Investigating histories embedded in cultural and environmental landscapes, and exploring their relationships with present geopolitical issues, Unseen Guests proposes artistic investigations alongside Pan-African cultural archives across the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focusing on documentations of anticolonial events and testimonies of climate change.
Experimenting with elements that may not have been recognisable as significant, Unseen Guests commissions a series of artworks exploring archival material to identify connecting tissues between different narratives.
Ibiye is a British Nigerian multidisciplinary artist. Her work engages with technology, trade and material within the African Diaspora. Ibiye’s work utilises architectural tools to create sound and video, textiles, accompanied by augmented reality and 3D objects, and highlights the biases and conflicts inherent to technology and postcolonial subjects. Her past projects in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ethiopia investigated the dynamics of technology as a means to explore the glitches and tensions between digital infrastructure and the landscape.
Ibiye Camp holds an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, from the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. Ibiye’s Thesis project titled Data: The New Black Gold was awarded the School of Architectures Dean’s Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Award.
Ibiye previously tutored at the Royal College of Art in the School of Architecture from 2020-2023. She tutored in Media Studies and Architecture Design Studio 2 with Dele Adeyemo and Dámaso Randulfe.
Ibiye co-founded Xcessive Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary design collective exploring data through immersive technologies and public installations. With Co-Tutors Rhiarna Dhaliwal and Emmy Bacharach, Ibiye runs a BA Studio titled Digital Native at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Ibiye’s artwork has been presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2016), the Porto Design Biennale (2019) Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019), Triennale Milano (2020), 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2020) and 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021), ICA (2022), Deptford X London (2022)The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, (2023).
Ibiye Camp
Nolan Oswald Dennis is a para-disciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores ‘a black consciousness of space’ - the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization - questioning histories of space and time through system-specific interventions.
They hold a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits 2012) and a Science Master’s degree in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT 2018).
They work within and against a grammar of world-making: using indexical, analytic and educational devices (drawings, diagrams, maps, models, etc) as ambiguous tools for rehearsing possible meanings rather than forms of instruction. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation.
Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Van Abbemuseum, the Seoul Mediacity Biennial, Young Congo Biennale (Kinshasa), FRONT triennial (Columbus), Shanghai Biennial, Videobrazil, Liverpool Biennial and the Lagos Biennial among others.
They are a founding member of artist group NTU, a research associate at the VIAD research centre at the University of Johannesburg, and a member of the Index Literacy Program.
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Rodrigo Nava Ramirez (he/him) is a visual artist and computer programmer from Mexico City. In his work, Rodrigo seeks to practically and conceptually reframe digital technologies as tools for exploring spaces that are materially and temporarily restricted, creating alternative spaces for representation.
Rodrigo finds interest in how technology shapes our understanding of movement, borders, time and space and how by re-contextualising these concepts in the digital realm spaces for non-performance and refusal can be opened. The emancipation of technology as a decolonising act of resistance. His research is framed by Mexica Cosmologies, Mexico’s colonial past and the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. Among current core concepts are hybridity, worldbuilding, and psychogeography, drawing on notions of opacity, creolisation and the glitch, as found in the writings of Legacy Russell and Édouard Glissant.
Rodrigo Nava Ramírez
Shamica Ruddock is an artist often found working between sound and moving image. Shamica’s current research concerns sound cultures and Black sonic modalities.
Approaching sound as a site for knowledge production, she considers the ways Afro-diasporas emerge through sound. She is particularly interested in how Black technosonic production functions as a form of narrativising and worldmaking. Maroon histories, fugitivity and Black temporal entanglements have also proved resonant departure points. Selected presentations include the Barbican Centre (UK), Treasure Hill Artist Village (TW), Tate Britain (UK), and Aesthetica Short Film Festival (UK). In 2022 Shamica had a solo show with the South London Gallery titled Deciphering a Broken Syntax, producing a 4 track vinyl record of the same name. Residencies include Amant Foundation (US), Black Cultural Archives (UK), Somerset House (UK) and QO2 (BE). In 2021 Shamica was a British Library Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow researching Maroon sound cultures.
Shamica Ruddock
Beatriz Lobo Britto (b. 1994, Brazil) is iniva’s curator since 2022, where she is responsible for the development and delivery of exhibitions and public programmes with a focus on artistic practices from Global Majority, working with artists and partners to implement artistic projects through research, radical art education, unlearning, and wellbeing practices.
Beatriz is also a museologist, researcher and an enthusiast of non-hierarchical thinking, believing in the equality of ideas and non-linear ways of composing and organising them. Since 2011, Beatriz has been an advocate for Indigenous rights, working on community-led projects with a focus on education and land justice in South America.
Beatriz holds a BA (Hons) in Museum Studies from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and MA in Curatorial Practice with a focus in Contemporary Art from Glasgow School of Art. Previously, she held curatorial positions at The NewBridge Project (Newcastle, UK), Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow, UK), Museu do Índio (Museum of Indigenous Peoples, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
Beatriz Lobo Britto
Renée Akitelek Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker. Her custom relies on biography and storytelling as a form of research and production. Renée is presently preoccupied with looking and speaking about images and how they are produced but especially how they have come to play a critical role as evidence of white paranoia, and as aesthetic idioms of racial violence.
Mboya works between Kigali and Nairobi and is a collaborative editor with the Wali Chafu Collective.
Renée Akitelek Mboya
Leanne Petersen is a curator, creative producer and freelance writer. She has curated and produced several projects for organisations including the second iteration of the Hackney Windrush Art Commission by Thomas J Price entitled ‘Warm Shores’ 2022. Her experience previously held posts at Hauser & Wirth (London), David Zwirner Gallery (London/New York) and Autograph ABP (London) where she co-organised solo artists commissions by Phoebe Boswell: The Space Between Things (2019), Arpita Shah: The Scared Cloth (2018) and Omar Victor Diop: Liberty/Diaspora (2018). Her research and writing practice centres around Black British history focusing on oral and written histories, lived experiences and introspection surrounding identity and representation. She has been published online and in print for publications including Frieze and Art Monthly.
Helena Uambembe, born in 1994 in Pomfret, South Africa, is an artist of Angolan descent whose work is heavily influenced by her heritage and experiences. Her parents fled the civil war in Angola and her father was a soldier in the 32nd Battalion of the South African Defence Force. Uambembe's artistic practice explores themes of the 32nd Military Battalion and her Angolan heritage.
She obtained her Btech in 2018 from Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa and is a member of the collective Kutala Chopeto. In 2019, Uambembe won the David Koloane Award and completed a two-month residency at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg. She has exhibited at Art Basel Statement where she was awarded the Baloise Art Prize in 2022.
In 2023, Uambembe was awarded the DAAD Visual Arts Fellowship in Berlin, Germany, which supports international artists to develop their work through a residency program. With a unique artistic voice rooted in her personal experience and heritage, Helena Uambembe continues to explore and push the boundaries of contemporary art.
Helena Uambembe
Gladys Kalichini is a contemporary visual artist and researcher from Lusaka, Zambia. Her work centres around notions of erasure, memory, and representations and visibilities of women primarily in colonial resistance histories. She completed her Master of Fine Art degree in 2018 from Rhodes University and later graduated in 2023 with a doctorate in Art History.
Kalichini is a member of the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme, supported by the Andrew. W. Mellon foundation and the National Research Fund. She is the 2022 main prize winner for the Henrike Grohs Art Award and a recipient of the Prince Claus Seed Award. She has participated in the revolving art school known as Àsìkò in 2015 when it was hosted in Mozambique. She has participated in projects such as the second iteration of the “Women On Aeroplanes” project in Lagos, Nigeria in 2018 themed “Search Research: Looking for Collete Omogbai”. Selected residencies that she has participated in include the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, USA in 2017, Künstlerhaus Bethanien international studio programme in Berlin, Germany in 2019/2020, supported by the KFW – Stiftung and a fellowship at the Victoria College of Arts (Melbourne University) in Australia in 2024.
Gladys Kalichini
Alexis G. Teyie is a poet, data scientist, curator, and publisher. Teyie was one of the co-founders of Enkare Review, and currently works with Down River Road (DRR) and Karara Community Library. Previous books include a poetry chapbook, Clay Plates: Broken Records of Kiswahili Proverbs, and a children's book, Shortcut.
Teyie also leads research and advisory for nonprofits, startups, and impact investors.
Alexis G Teyie
Yaa Addae (she/they) is a writer, researcher, and participatory curator who is committed to imagining ways of being outside of the colonial structures we have inherited and holding space for collectively designing alternative systems to support this work.
They are currently investigating structural barriers to loving through Open Heart Clinic, a social design incubator for imagining future care infrastructure. Previously, Yaa founded A-KRA Studio which housed Decolonize The Art World, an anticolonial art history platform and The Imaginarium, a virtual residency program for Ghanaian digital artists. She also was the curatorial assistant for Ano Institute‘s travelling Kiosk museum, an experiment in creating exhibition architecture informed by locality. Alongside their cultural work, Yaa works in healthcare as a design researcher.
Yaa Adae
For the second edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, iniva presents Unseen Guests: a series of commissions of eight artists based in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), working across new media, audiovisual and writing to create new works in dialogue with the work of filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, representing Great Britain at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale
The Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) is an evolving visual arts organisation dedicated to nurturing and disseminating radical and emergent decolonising and unlearning practices centring Global Majority, Indigenous, African, Asian, Caribbean, Polynesian, Latinx & Diaspora perspectives that reflects on the social and political impact of globalisation.
The Pavilion is a series of radical re-imaginings of nationhood, reflecting on the entanglement between land and water, movement and m/otherlands, in the forging of new identities and subjectivities.
Unseen Guests is curated by Beatriz Lobo Britto and Renée Akitelek Mboya, and produced by Leanne Petersen.
Artists developing new works include ibiye Camp, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Gladys Kalichini, Rodrigo Nava Ramirez, Shamica Ruddock, Yaa Addae, Alexis G Teyie and Helena Uambembe.
Unseen Guest Project Team
Sepake Angiama - iniva Artistic Director
Beatriz Lobo - UK Curator
Renée Akitelek Mboya - SSA Curator
Leanne Petersen - Project Producer
Rodrigo Nava Ramirez - Web Development and Design
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