“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
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, 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.
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. Two writers will be selected through an international open call, to be announced in April 2024.
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.