As a digital programme in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale, iniva is pleased to announce the third edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, titled The Message Is in the Pattern.
This programme is developed in response to Lubaina Himid’s British Pavilion commission Predicting History: Testing Translation, which draws on her long-standing methodologies of making histories visible, working collaboratively, and attending to the political significance of everyday materials and gestures. The programme foregrounds lived practices and relational forms of making that emerge through sustained engagement with communities.
Three invited artists, Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil) are supported to work within their local contexts, exploring the intersection of community engagement, cultural translation, and the relationship between artistic and social practice.
In addition, the programme will commission four writers through an international open call, to respond critically and creatively to the digital works. These texts will be brought together in a digital publication that extends the life of the programme and situates the commissions within wider artistic, social, and political conversations.
This edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion follows DRIFT (2022) and Unseen Guests (2024), continuing iniva’s commitment to building transnational and research-led public programmes, making art from a global perspective accessible to everyone.
The Message Is in the Pattern is supported by the British Council.
About the Artists
Anya Paintsil
Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in London and Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood in North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines craft practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create large scale portraits. Paintsils’ figures explore the possibilities and politics of non representative depictions of the Black figure.
Often mistaken as subversion of ‘primitivism’, Paintsil deliberately and consciously refuses to root her work in the European Fine Art Canon, Paintsil’s visual language finds its basis in traditional West African Crafts and Art – carvings, wood sculptures, masks – exchanging the hard materials for soft, in an interrogation of gendered labour, particularly the labour of working class women.
Rajyashri Goody
Rajyashri Goody was born in 1990 in Pune, India. She is currently based in Goa. Goody completed her BA in Sociology at Fergusson College in Pune in 2011, and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK in 2013. In 2023, she completed a two year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
Her research interests include food and water politics, religion, literacy and literature, mobility and place-making in the context of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance in India. She works with found objects, paper pulp, clay, text, photographs, printmaking, and performance.
Goody’s work has been presented at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2025, 2019); Bukhara Biennial (2025); Sao Paulo Bienal (2025); Sharjah Biennial (2025); Busan Biennale (2024); National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2024); Asia Now, Paris (2023); Jogja Fotografis Festival, Yogyakarta (2023); Recontres de Bamako (2023); Galleryske, New Delhi (2022); Breda Photo (2022); Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022); Goethe Institut, Pune and Mumbai (2025, 2021).
Rose Afefé
Rose Afefé is a visual artist from Bahia, Brazil. Working across installation, painting, and photography, her practice is rooted in the activation of memory, territory, and collective knowledge. She is the creator of Terra Afefé, an ongoing, human-scale micro-city built with earth using traditional adobe techniques and lime painting, located in the rural area of Ibicoara, in the Chapada Diamantina region. Conceived as a living artwork, Terra Afefé operates as a space of encounter and coexistence, where art and life intersect through local knowledge, nature, and shared processes.