We are delighted to announce the writers selected to develop new texts as part of the next phase of The Message Is in the Pattern, the third iteration of iniva’s Post-National Digital Pavilion, developed in collaboration with the British Council in the context of the 61st Venice Biennale.
Following an international open call that received 117 applications, we are thrilled to welcome Bardi Osobuanomola Catherine, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Vijayta Lalwani, Ritika Biswas and Kefiloe Siwisa to the project.
The selected writers will develop new texts responding to the three commissioned works by Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil). Their contributions will form part of a forthcoming publication, extending the conversations and questions raised by the commissions through a range of critical, creative, and experimental approaches to writing.
We are deeply grateful to everyone who shared their work with us. We were inspired by the extraordinary range of perspectives, geographies, and writing practices represented across the applications.
We look forward to sharing more about the selected writers and their contributions as the project develops.
About the Writers
Bardi Osobuanomola Catherine
Bardi Osobuanomola Catherine is a writer, educator, and cultural practitioner based in Lagos, Nigeria. Her practice moves between criticism, curatorial writing, and community-based futuring, centering the artists and institutions that sustain contemporary art across the African continent.
She is the Communications and Events Lead at Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, writing on artists in residence and supporting the Foundation’s public programming. She coordinates Lagos Speculative Futures, an independent project envisioning the future of Lagos’ rural communities, and founded The Huts Magazine (2020-2024), a contemporary art publication spotlighting emerging and mid-career artists and photographers from Africa and beyond. Her writing has appeared in AKKA Projects, Sunday Morning at the River, Art News Africa, among others. In collaboration with artists Mr Danfo and Serafadeen Bello, she co-developed and taught a foundational course on building an art practice, beginning in 2025. She is an Arts in Medicine alumna.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf, Penguin Random House.
Vijayta Lalwani
Vijayta Lalwani an award-winning journalist and writer. Her work traces the broader impact of politics and polarisation on livelihoods in India. She has helmed groundbreaking investigations concerning sectarian violence, public health and gender. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Earthbound. She is a recipient of awards including the Human Rights & Religious Freedom Award for Best Text Reporting and grants from the Pulitzer Centre. Her work has been published in several national and international publications.
Ritika Biswas
Ritika Biswas (b. 1995) is an independent curator, artistic researcher, and writer from Kolkata who lives and works nomadically. She works on and via ecological criticism, experimental kinships, necropolitics, and questions of justice. Along with artist collective Chander Haat, she will curate the upcoming Bengal Biennale (2026-27).
Holding a Liberal Arts degree from Yale-NUS College and an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge, Ritika was a curator at New Art Exchange Gallery (Nottingham, UK) from 2019-2021 and Artistic Director for the 2021 Sea Art Festival (Busan Biennale).
Selected recent exhibitions include —scape (Gallery 88 Mumbai), Spectres of Our Own Making (15th Gwangju Biennale), Nine Nodes of Non-Being (421 Arts Campus Abu Dhabi), the digital research platform Littoral Chronicle (2023-ongoing), among others. She was the 2024 Curator-in-Residence at Fondation Fiminco Paris and 2022 International Research Fellow at MMCA Seoul.
Kefiloe Siwisa
Kefiloe Siwisa is a Johannesburg-based cultural worker—or perhaps wanderer—whose practice prioritises empathy, collective presencing, and restoration.
Kefiloe’s current preoccupation is with the politics and poetics of residue: leftover things in leftover places. Approaching the residual as both condition and methodology, she is interested in the practice of remaining—attending to the people, places, ideas, and ecologies that persist after extraction.
Kefiloe has curated exhibitions, public programmes, developmental initiatives, and international convenings across Africa and Europe. She has collaborated with organisations including Haus der Kunst Munich, ICA London, ICA Live Art Festival, the British Council, Wysing Arts Centre, Pro Helvetia, Institut français d’Afrique du Sud, the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, Africa Centre London, the Birmingham Commonwealth Games Festival, the South African Cultural Observatory, Stevenson Gallery, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and Spier Arts Trust, among others.
She is also the co-founder of Queertopia.za, a queer-centred multidisciplinary festival, and holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
(where rivers meet oceans)
The Message Is in the Pattern is presented by iniva as part of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, in collaboration with the British Council.
