Southnord and Amos Rex reimagine landscape, movement, and Black spatial imaginaries in a major collaborative exhibition that unsettles fixed perspectives and invites a deeper, more sensuous reading of the world.
22 september 2026
As the headline exhibition of Southnord Artfest 2026, ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’ unfolds as a layered, polyphonic inquiry into how landscapes, cities, and systems shape lived experience across the African continent and its diasporas. Co-curated by Marcia Harvey Isaksson and Katariina Timonen, the exhibition resists singular narratives, instead offering a shifting terrain of overlapping histories, routes, and ways of knowing. Together, the curators reflect on collaboration, spatial thinking, and the possibilities that emerge when multiple worlds coexist.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’ brings together artists across geographies and contexts. How did you approach building a curatorial framework that holds these different positions without forcing a singular narrative?
Marcia Harvey Isaksson: I am personally always curious about the multiple perspectives that can exist within one individual or within a group, and what insights those perspectives can share with the rest of us. I have spent half my life living as an African on the African continent and the other half as an African in the Nordic diaspora, so my perspectives on what it means to be African, depending on geography and context, have become richer and more varied. The artists in the exhibition constantly move between geographies, both physically and emotionally, making their perspectives particularly interesting. We, as a curatorial duo, wondered how they view the urban landscapes they traverse and how they are affected by them; what histories do these landscapes hold, and how do these artists go about exploring and unearthing them? The curatorial framework thus became a vessel for a polyphonic exploration of narratives that navigate and map the living structures and systems we all operate within.
Katariina Timonen: Yes, at the core of the curatorial framework were precisely the artists’ multiple narratives, which are constantly shifting and being reshaped as they move and work across different locations. Our aim was to explore through the works how different sites and landscapes create distances and proximities between people, both on conscious and unconscious levels. The artists’ perspectives vary, but even as geographies and contexts change, I see that a certain focus remains on place – on the city and the landscape. The urban environment in particular, with its layered nature, recurs in many forms across the works, enabling the exploration of memory, migration, and movement from multiple perspectives.
The exhibition engages with ideas of distance, proximity, and connection. How did these concepts shape both the selection of works and the relationships between them?
KT: In selecting the works, we focused on our thematic starting points, which the works themselves helped to further define along the way. Distance and proximity were present from the beginning, and landscape, as well as the formation of urban structures, quickly emerged as the clearest expressions of the themes that interested us. At the same time, the ever-changing landscape was evident in the artists’ diverse backgrounds. Both Southnord’s and Amos Rex’s positions within the Nordic art field naturally guided a focus on the Nordic diaspora, and we were interested in the dialogue between that and artists working on the African continent. How might the works reflect the mental as well as physical distances and proximities inevitably embedded in this dialogue? Where and how would they meet? We also kept in mind that by examining how different environments and sites shape our perspectives and create different levels of distances and proximities, we simultaneously create space within the exhibition where the works can position themselves in relation to one another in varied ways, forming new routes and worlds; even ones we as curators could not have anticipated. This sense of organic growth and unpredictability, comparable to the development of urban structures, was very appealing to us. For example, Loulou Cherinet’s work draws attention to state design and seemingly perfectly planned residential areas in the Nordics, reflecting on the relationship between care and violence, as well as the relationship between organically growing urban structures and carefully planned built environments designed for specific purposes. At the same time, the physical space in which the dialogue between works was constructed played a significant role: the underground exhibition halls of Amos Rex, with their dominant architecture, placed strong demands on the works.
MHI: The exhibition brings quite disparate practices into physical proximity. The exhibition’s spatial design, conceived by the architectural studio NLÉ, features few to no walls separating the installations. This approach creates dialogue between the works, teasing out unexpected connections and parallels. I am interested in exploring how distances and proximities can manifest in the most unexpected ways. For example, I may be sitting next to someone on the metro who is miles apart from me socially, politically, and emotionally; all the while texting with my best friend who lives on the other side of an ocean. Urban landscapes, especially cities, are sites that concentrate different peoples, layers of architecture, histories and time into a dense mass. All layers may not be visible all at once, but with a little loitering, lingering and listening with intent, much more can be revealed. All the artists in the exhibition listen with intent, piercing through the physical and metaphysical layers of landscape. A good example is the work of Akinbode Akinbiyi, who has been wandering the metropolises of Africa for over five decades, capturing everyday moments, using walking to penetrate the crevices of cities and returning to document subtle and significant changes in the built environment.
Mapping, routes, and circulation appear as recurring threads. How did you think about movement beyond geography, particularly in relation to knowledge, language, and memory?
MHI: In today’s globalised world, the movement of materials, goods and people is an everyday occurrence. But mobility is not equally accessible to all. Depending on the passport one holds, nation-state borders are a very real thing, a barrier designed to keep certain people on the outside. So free movement becomes a privilege enjoyed by few. Raw materials and goods, however, are happily welcomed from the Global South to the Global North, making for an uneven playing field. Ibrahim Mahama’s works deal with the circulation of materials and goods, and with the residue of labour and human effort that becomes embedded in them. Movement has, however, always been a part of humanity; that is how homo sapiens came to populate the entire globe, by wandering away from Africa. With them, they carried ancient wisdom and knowledge that spread and developed, and that were shared and re-shared as the centuries passed. This is still ongoing today, and digital circulation has accelerated the speed at which this occurs. So, memory blurs between the collective and the individual. As Emeka Ogboh writes about his ongoing work with Lagos’ quintessential transportation van, the Danfo bus, the bus becomes a device for rethinking migration not as mere movement, but as a web of relations where people, memories and cultures circulate, accumulate and mutate across distance. Colonial languages, history books and norms dominate and become the languages of internal thoughts and dreams, displacing indigenous ways of knowing and being. However, I see in many of the works a resistance against this erasure, a reclaiming of space and an acceptance of the entanglements that complicate identity.
KT: Themes of mapping, routes, and movement are indeed present throughout the exhibition. Maps and route markings, in relation to Black perspectives, rewriting dominant narratives and the history of colonialism, emerged here and there also at the last Dakar Biennale in 2024, which was a huge source of inspiration for me. These themes interested us especially when viewed from a Nordic context, as they allow for the expression of different temporalities and forms of remembering. In a sense, we see the works in the exhibition as time-travelling vessels, through which parallel chronologies and overlapping realities become visible. Language is deeply intertwined with these different realities, temporalities, locations, and movements, as well as with the formation of identity within them. For example, the video installation Aphasia by Adji Dieye begins from the loss of language and situates it within the urban setting, in institutional public locations in Dakar. The work clearly presents the distance and complexity between the colonial language, French, and the lingua franca, Wolof. Karl Ohiri, on the other hand, lingers around the concept of language in his own intimate way, depicting non-verbal communication between generations, transcending the realm of the living, and tapping into the residual energy left behind in spaces – particularly the sites of personal memory such as a public hall, a morgue, and a private home. All the artists in this exhibition are navigating the post-colonial landscape through the unique lens of their Africanness, filtered through their multiple localities. They employ different knowledge systems, especially sensuous knowledge, within their practices, highlighting the strategies black bodies use to survive and thrive, to exist and resist within the inherited structures and landscapes of modern society.
The exhibition foregrounds Black perspectives within a Nordic institutional context. How did you navigate questions of visibility, representation, and structural limitation within this space?
MHI: The exhibition is a collaboration between Southnord and Amos Rex, where the former is an artist-run platform focused on creating space for Black and AfroNordic visual artists, and the latter is a well-funded, well-established institution owned by a private foundation. This may appear as an obvious power imbalance at first glance; however, as I see it, neither of us could have pulled off this particular exhibition without the other. The embodied knowledge and specific professional interest I have as an Afro-diasporic curator bring expertise to this institution and to others with whom Southnord collaborates, which is not always centred or prioritised. Even though my co-curator, Tintti (Katariina), nurtured a similar idea of centring Black practices for many years, it is only when we teamed up that the stars aligned. Only recently did Amos Rex appoint Khanyisile Mbongwa as curator of art in the public realm as the first Black woman on staff, an amazing step in the right direction, but I believe that real structural change in terms of diversity and representation on the Nordic cultural scene will take time, and every country in the region is at a different stage of development. That is why I choose to work from outside of the mainstream, tapping into it to add and gain values of mutual benefit. However, Southnord will always prioritise building and maintaining our own home, as that gives us the freedom to work consistently and unwaveringly on what we deem important.
KT: Southnord has indeed played a major role in this – the organisation’s work, and the Artfest held for the second time, have been centred on foregrounding Black and Afro-diasporic perspectives within a Nordic context, in this case within the very white Finnish institutional setting of Amos Rex. Black perspectives have not been particularly prominent in the museum’s exhibition history, and examining institutional structures during the exhibition process has been both necessary and welcome. Many of the artists’ works examine the impact of space and the survival strategies of Black bodies in Nordic environments. Seeing these works in our institutional context, in our museum space, feels very relevant. For example, Skin to Skin by Sandra Mujinga creates a world of its own, where varying degrees of visibility and invisibility blend into a green glow beneath the museum’s large dome. Igshaan Adams, on the other hand, incorporates “desire lines” into his large-scale installations, which represent forms of freedom and resistance, especially in the South African context: paths that pedestrians take intuitively rather than following officially planned routes, which are often designed to separate different districts from each other.
There is a strong sense of world-building across the works. How did you approach narrative as a curatorial tool without fixing meaning or interpretation?
MHI: The works span multiple geographies, highlighting everything from global trade routes and metropolises to structural scars in the landscape, migration, navigation tools, and the intimate spaces of home. It is precisely these many layers and scales that contribute to the sense of world-building, a type of multiverse where timelines are compressed and collapsed onto one another and parallel realities exist within the same space. The nature of each artist’s installation and the exhibition’s spatiality as a whole also contribute to the immersive, all-encompassing feeling.
KT: Narrative – or rather, multiple narratives – form pathways across the exhibition, overlapping and intertwining to build a dialogue that is never static but constantly shifting. Certain themes recur, but the ways they are addressed open new perspectives each time. The idea was that the exhibition would contain multiple worlds in dialogue with one another, sometimes even merging together. We did not want to separate, categorise, or label these worlds, but rather allow them to flow freely through the space. The exhibition architect Kunlé Adeyemi described the exhibition as resembling formations of urban fields or organically formed swirls, comparing its shapes to swarms of bees or flocks of birds found in nature. The exhibition as a whole becomes a kind of landscape that visitors must navigate on their own. The realities and narratives opened up by the works create passages to both the past and the present, while also turning our gaze toward what lies ahead: perhaps the worlds created by the artists awaken our imagination, expand our thinking, and function as building blocks for new kinds of futures.
Collaboration sits at the core of this project, particularly between Southnord and Amos Rex. How did this partnership shape the exhibition’s direction and curatorial decisions?
MHI: My main interest lies in the Nordic diaspora, and when I met Tintti, who shared similar thoughts, we found a way to combine our ideas and develop them together, enriching the project tremendously. The exhibition now features 11 artists, of whom 5 are based in the Nordics, and 6 are mostly based on the African continent, though some have multiple nodes moving between Europe and the Continent. The main themes crystallised through many discussions and thinking together. For me personally, it feels like a clear and logical progression from the first iteration of the Southnord Artfest in 2023, The Threshold is a Prism, which was focused on what it means to be a human being living in the diaspora, physically, spiritually and emotionally. ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’ zooms out from the individual to the collective, examining how landscapes as state design and cities as living organisms shape our existence and how we relate to one another.
KT: In my point of view, working with Marcia and Southnord has been incredibly rewarding – and also fun. At the beginning, we discussed the exhibition’s broad outlines and themes: where we wanted to take it, what we wanted to express through it, and why. We both brought ideas to the table, which we then developed further together. We compiled lists of artists who might resonate both with the themes and with the space. It was exciting to immerse ourselves in different artistic practices and works; I hope that in the future we could also present works by some of the amazing artists whom we did not select for this exhibition, perhaps in the form of solo shows. Co-curation, grounded in dialogue, naturally shaped the exhibition, including the decision to focus on the diaspora primarily within the Nordic context. At the same time, the artists participating in the exhibition who work partly or entirely on the African continent also move between multiple countries and continents, and it was precisely this constant movement between locations that interested us. I see this kind of collaboration as almost essential for museum institutions; working with an organisation that operates differently, or with an external curator, reveals aspects of one’s own organisation and working methods that benefit from critical examination. It can be awakening and open up new ways of thinking and working. We have learned a great deal from Southnord’s approaches, and I have great respect and appreciation for our partner. I hope that the dialogue initiated through this exhibition will continue in some form, also in the future.
The exhibition holds multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways of knowing and seeing. How did you create space for complexity and contradiction within the curatorial structure?
MHI: I welcome the complexity within and between the narratives and shy away from trying to flatten them into 2-dimensionality or to explain every possible link or opening. The unfolding of the works and the choreography of the space welcome the audience to approach the exhibition as they see fit. There are many pathways through each installation; the installations bleed into each other, and everything can be seen and experienced from many different perspectives, with different foregrounds and backgrounds. It is this constant shifting of perspectives that we pursued through the work. Liisa-Irmelen Liwata’s intimate work highlights how these complexities and contradictions can coexist within the same body as she navigates between a Finnish national identity and Congolese ancestral roots, envisioning the body as a living map whose contours construct a new geography and cosmology.
KT: Because dialogue was the starting point of the exhibition, it was clear from the beginning that it would also include contradictions, overlaps, complexity, and multiplicity. The aim is to open up and nurture different ways of knowing and seeing, not just one, because no single correct way exists. These collisions are precisely what create compelling dialogue. The smell of petrol in Lungiswa Gqunta’s work also encapsulates the confrontation with and exposure to uncomfortable realities. Honest dialogue and change emerge from these complex and contradictory situations, not from clinging to a single truth within one’s comfort zone.
The title suggests a shift in perspective, a looking beyond or through. What does “the other side” open up for you conceptually, and how do you hope audiences carry this with them beyond the exhibition?
MHI: ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’ is a title borrowed from the Swedish translation of the Nigerian-Finnish-Swedish feminist author and social critic Minna Salami, who starts her book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone with the legend of a great mountain visited by two different explorers – one of them encountered nothing but an arid rock face, the other lush green forested slopes filled with multitudes of plant species. The same mountain, seen from different angles. Salami challenges Europatriarchal knowledge systems that emphasise rule-bound, rigid rationality, disregarding the information provided by our senses and instincts. She proposes that building an ecologically and socially sustainable future requires a broader understanding, validation and harnessing of sensuous knowledge, which does not reject rational thinking but adds to it by emphasising the value of experience, intuition and embodiment. For me, “the other side” does not imply a binary or a dichotomy, pitting one worldview against another. It is a way to ask the audience to check their blind spots, to consider which vantage points they survey the world from, what is visible to them from there and what they miss. I think it is important for us all to entertain the thought that other ways of knowing, being, and seeing may also be valid and true, and that there are as many perspectives as there are human beings on Earth.
KT: In my mind, “the other side of the mountain” does not refer to a single place or position from which one could suddenly see the world anew, but rather to a constantly shifting, non-static positioning of oneself in relation to the surrounding world – a perspective that changes under the influence of our environment. This environment can refer to both geographical and mental landscapes. I hope that as visitors leave the exhibition, they carry with them an awareness of how different landscapes, spaces and sites shape us as we move through them. Perhaps even a familiar urban square might, through the sensitivity cultivated by the exhibition, reveal new layers, routes, cracks, or traces. In Jeannette Ehlers’s work Moko is Future, the Moko Jumbie figure, having leapt across the sea, dances through the empty streets of Copenhagen, immersed in its own carnival, in front of statues of dead white men – full of movement, joy, and power. It is images like this, of other very existing realities, that I believe we both hope will remain in visitors’ memories.
This exhibition will be on view at Southnord Artfest 2026, from 14 October 2026 until 21 March 2027.
