“I’m interested in the way that unseen guests arrive at parties, and become actually quite prominent party members, becoming central actors in the ongoing proceedings” — John Akomfrah
As part of the public programme for the British Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Unseen Guests 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.
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.
Unseen Guests invites eight artists to develop new works, including Ibiye Camp, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Gladys Kalichini, Rodrigo Nava Ramirez, Shamica Ruddock and Helena Uambembe, and writers Yaa Addae and Alex/is G. Tayie, selected through an international open call.
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.
Unseen Guests is co-curated by Renée Akitelek Mboya and Beatriz Lobo Britto, and produced by Leanne Petersen.
This project is funded by the British Council.
About the commissions
The commissioned artists engage with cultural and environmental histories, delving into the nuances of archival material, unearthing connections between past and present geopolitical issues, and examining elements that may have once been overlooked or rendered invisible.
The commissioned works reflect on histories embedded within cultural and environmental landscapes, exploring their relationship with present-day geopolitical issues. The commissioned works, launching on September 9, 2024, will feature explorations into diverse themes:
Yaa Addae – As Above / So Below
As Above / So Below challenges the assumption that the internet is a ‘post-national’ space, highlighting the relationship between colonial cartographies and the hidden infrastructure that enables our networked lives. Utilising a Side A and Side B, this essay reflects on the duality of what is seen and unseen by drawing on instances demonstrating how subverting encoded colonial logic, both online and AFK, can enable alternate ways of relating to one another.
Ibiye Camp – Stems and Roots
Stems and Roots conducts an investigation into the Cotton Tree of Freetown, Sierra Leone, a site deeply embedded with narratives of freedom, resilience, and postcolonial complexity. The Cotton Tree’s historical significance was established in 1792 when emancipated African Americans congregated beneath it, rendering it a pivotal locus of collective memory and identity formation. After centuries of withstanding natural and socio-political forces, the tree sustained critical damage during a 2023 storm. Utilizing Point Cloud software and social media archives, the project reconstructs the tree’s temporal states, mapping its transformation into a contested site of historical, cultural, and political resonance.
Nolan Oswald Dennis – whya
whya is a memory server collaging fragments of oral histories from the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) collected by the artist. Through an interactive digital structure, Dennis questions how memories are collected, reflected upon, and shared, proposing a relational approach to memory which embraces uncertainty, hesitancy and the ambiguities of trust.
Gladys Kalichini – uyu mukate upela ubumi (this bread gives life)
uyu mukate upela ubumi (this bread gives life) is a multi-channel video work that delves into the sacred and mnemonic properties of water, particularly within the context of cleansing rituals. Drawing from one of the hymns sung during the administration of holy communion, where water is used to wash away impurities, Kalichini reimagines the concept of an archive—not merely as a physical repository of historical documents but as a fluid, ever-shifting vessel of memory. This work asks whether water can hold memory and what it means for an archive to contain not just truths, but myths, half-truths, forgotten narratives, and the unspoken secrets of sacred knowledge. Through this lens, water becomes both a medium and a metaphor for the stories that shape and transcend individual and collective histories.
Rodrigo Nava Ramirez – Unseen Guests’ Post-National Digital Pavilion
Unseen Guests’ Post-National Digital Pavilion reflects on the sea’s contemplative and currently endangered ecologies. Utilising John Akomfrah’s urgent discourse on climate justice and ongoing explorations of maritime narratives, water recurs as a motif, symbolising not only a repository of memories but also bearing witness to complex histories of colonial conquests, the transatlantic slave trade, and the continued flux of migrant currents within the vast expanse of the ocean. Nava Ramirez draws inspiration from the proliferation of jellyfish, a phenomenon exacerbated by rising temperatures and deteriorating marine conditions. This increase is a direct consequence of human impact on the environment and symbolises the absence of other marine life—a form of underwater desertification. Reflecting on the notion of Unseen Guests, Nava Ramirez explores the presence of the invisible and the remnants of what once was, utilising climate data to orchestrate a choreography of lights that mimic the movements of jellyfish, shifting in colour and intensity in response to sea temperatures. Aligning the behaviour of these lights with the metrics governing jellyfish movement creates a digital space controlled by the physical presence of jellyfish in the sea.
Shamica Ruddock – In The Shadows, There Is A Freedom (A pt2)
In The Shadows, There Is A Freedom (pt2) is a sound work building on the artist’s ongoing research on Maroon societies in the Americas. Maroon settlements inherently fugitive in nature remained sites of refuge for Maroon communities away from the plantations. Rejecting the placehold of slave, often relocating to dense bush areas, and maintaining always originary claims to Africa, Maroons were fundamentally ‘Unseen Guests’ in strangelands. Existing as outliers, traipsing along the peripheries, the Maroons were able to survive retaining arguably direct access to ancestral cultural expressions despite a reality shaped by distance and dispossession. This work plays on the notion of Maroon sonic technologies as coded communication, bringing together processed recordings of drumming both found and from the artist’s own archive. Navigating the site, similar to the Maroons movements sounds appear and disappear, move in and out of the shadows to locate.
Alex/is Grace Teyie – Drip Drip is Not Drop Drop / Chururu si Ndondondo
Drip Drip is Not Drop Drop / Chururu si Ndondondo weaves a lyrical meditation on the ancient and eternal connection between water, life, and language. This evocative piece explores the tension between distance and closeness, past and present, as it calls us to reawaken our attunement to the primordial waters that sustain both body and spirit. Through complex, poetic imagery, Teyie invites readers to navigate the depths of memory, fabulation, and the collective thirst for renewal. As we grapple with the desiccation of our histories and the salt of forgotten longings, Teyie’s work becomes a vessel for rehydrating our shared consciousness. Drip Drip is Not Drop Drop / Chururu si Ndondondo is a call to quench the thirst of generations, drawing us toward a future where we may drink from the pure waters once more.
Helena Uambembe – The woman and the goldfish
The woman and the goldfish is a fictional story that is inspired by the remote village of Pomfret. Pomfret is a town on the edge of the Kalahari desert in the North West Province of south africa. It was an asbestos mining town and later was ‘rehabilitated’ to house the soldiers of the 32 Battalion and their families. When the military was active in Pomfret they had placed a fountain made of stones in the center of Pomfret. The fountain housed koi fish and it was maintained, the water was always flowing while there was water scarcity for the people living in pomfret. The fictional story looks at the notions of exile, displacement and the limitation of resources. The story also looks at the distortion of time and distance on how change seems to be stagnant but how one can only continue with some sense of normalcy and care.