Based in Oslo and one of Atelier Kunstnerforbundet’s Artists 2024-2026, the interdisciplinary artworks of Rafiki (b. 1989) find their starting point between photography and bead work, textiles, waste materials, and the use of objects imbued with memorial capacities. With a process-based practice, Rafiki’s artworks are not ‘final’ – and hold healing, remembrance, and cultural analysis as central. Artistic strategies in her practice often avoid Western, anthropological gazes. Incorporating symbolism, fables, and tools from visual storytelling and oral history in her pictures, she invokes themes such as forced displacement, war, racialized understandings of Blackness and femininity, and burdened colonial traditions to control place and obliterate temporality.  

Rafiki is the founder of the Oslo-based platform Rafiki Art Initiatives (RAI), and has recently exhibited at Hordaland Kunstsenter (2025), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (2024), Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall (2024), and Buskerud Kunstsenter (2024). She is part of The National Museum of Norway’s itinerant exhibition ‘Skakke Folkedrakter / Queer folk dress’ (Norway, 2023-2026). Currently, Rafiki is developing Future Forest Kongo: a collective research- and dialogue project on memory and reconciliation towards a public monument consisting of 60,000 trees to be planted by 2030.

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