What now?
Myriam Amroun, Mariam Elnozahy, and Natasha Marie Llorens in Conversation
Saturday February 1, 2025
16:00 - 18:00
NKF's Guest Studio
Nytorget 15 A
Please join us for the first public event of Decolonization is Not a Metaphor in which we ask: Is it possible to do this project now, in the on-going wake of genocide in Gaza?
Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens are in residence at NKF for six weeks to work intensively on a project committed to decoloniality at a structural level. As an introduction, they will present the organizing questions of their project as it was originally proposed in March 2023. Since October 7th 2024, the political field has shifted significantly in both the Nordic region and the North African region. Amroun and Llorens invite Konsthall C’s artistic director Mariam Elnozahy to join them in a conversation about how cultural work dedicated in a broad sense to de-centering whiteness has changed in response to the on-going and widely publicized genocide of Palestinians.
Bios:
Mariam Elnozahy is a curator, writer, and researcher and Artistic Director of Konsthall C in Stockholm. She has curated exhibitions in Cairo, Uppsala, Amsterdam, Jeddah, Basel, Stockholm, and London. Alongside curator Rado Istok, she produced an exhibition entitled "All That Is Solid Melts Into Water: Hydropower, Archeology, Indigeneity," which opened at the Uppsala Art Museum in September 2022 and at the Kunsthall Oslo in Spring 2023. Her project titled “Whose Open Society? Understanding Neoliberalism and the Economics of Artistic Production in the Middle East and former Eastern bloc” was presented at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Warsaw Biennale, UJazdowski, the Matter of Art Biennale, and Tranzit in Prague. Her writing has been published in Frieze Magazine, The Markaz Review, Hyperallergic, and MadaMasr. She was in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2022 and 2023. She holds a Masters degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT.
Myriam Amroun is an independent curator based in Algiers focused on the conditions for public-facing artistic production in Algeria. She is the co-founded and former artistic director of rhizome, an independent project space for contemporary art located in the center of Algiers. Amroun served as project coordinator for El Medreb in 2015 and 2016 conducting research on gentrification in the historical district of El Hamma in Algiers. She also worked for the DURAR project at the intersection of art and traditional crafts, and with DJART, a research initiative on the impact of music, visual art, and theatre on urban public space. In the last two years, she has taken part in the Mobile Lab hosted by documenta15, served as a mentor for the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture’s Arts and Culture Entrepreneurship program, and undertaken residencies at the Cité des Arts in Paris and the Curatorial Research Program in the Nordics.
Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator, writer and professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, where she also co-directs the Center for Art and Political Imagination. Recent curatorial projects include 1000 Villages with artist Massinissa Selmani at Index Foundation in Stockholm and rhizome in Algiers. Recently published writing includes “Violence; Articulation: Ambivalence,” and “The Function of Language: Notes on a Crisis.”
Image credit: Nadine Ghannoum and Kinda Ghannoum for Flyers for Falastin, open access.