Makda Embaie is a poet and artist based in Oslo, whose practice engages language, embodiment, and belonging. Since 2018, Embaie is developing Breaking Bread and Language, an ongoing practice of translation sessions in which participants engage with language without the requirement of correctness or the capacity to read or write in the language they translate from. Through this practice, she developed a methodology grounded in repetition, memory, and collective meaning-making in which language and meaning are treated as a site of knowledge production, lived, and emerging through relation, rather than owned or complete through fixed definitions. Such practice proposes forms of community that resist restoring origins or resolving fragmentation, and that are not organized through the logics of the nation-state – which Embaie understands as an exclusive structure that produces legibility by defining language, belonging, and ideas of wholeness, and positioning certain experiences outside these.

Embaie (b.1994, Emmaboda, Sweden) holds a BFA from Konstfack – Stockholm’s University of Arts, Crafts and Design, has studied at Biskops-Arnö Writers’ School, and completed the post-master programme Decolonizing Architecture at the Konstakademien – The Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. In 2022, she received her MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KhiO). Recent works include Embaie’s solo exhibition Frukten Mognar at Konsthallen Blå Stället in Gothenburg (2025) and the sound installation If joy was the door, what would be the room?, exhibited at the Latvian National Museum of Art and Malmö Art Museum (2022/2025). Public commissions include I remember all of you (2024), developed in collaboration with Black Archives Sweden, and the light- and sound-installation Gravel scatters time (2023), developed for the city of Gothenburg.

Embaie takes part in the June Exhibition 2026, titled Shifting Coordinates.