Daría Sól Andrews, After the Naming
Editor: Muna Jibril
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from working within structures that were not built for you.
I moved back to Iceland from the United States, where the necessary and overdue conversations about race in art institutions had at least begun to take up space. Not enough space, but language existed for it. Infrastructure was being assembled and there were names for what I was navigating: structural racism, the diversity hire, the tax of representation, the invisible labor. In Iceland, I found the language didn’t always translate, because the framework for naming racism and inequity in institutional contexts is still largely being made. As Sara Ahmed has written, it is only when a problem becomes speakable, when a language exists for it, through which action becomes possible. What cannot be named cannot easily be addressed, organized around, or changed.
When I travel to the other Nordic countries, I notice something shift. Institutions like Moderna Museet in Stockholm or Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen have made meaningful, if incomplete, structural commitments: curators of color in decision-making roles, acquisitions that reflect a broader world, programming that does not treat diversity as a theme for a single season. They are operating within a framework that has moved, however incrementally, from panel discussion to policy.
And while those efforts remain partial, Iceland has not yet reached even that threshold. The distance between where it is and where it needs to be is not a problem of numbers. Smallness of numbers is not an argument against representation; it is precisely the argument for it. When a community is small, the stakes of every closed door are higher. Our BIPOC communities who are here are navigating these institutions without infrastructure, without precedent, often without anyone acknowledging that the navigation itself is labor.
The Alibi
Sara Ahmed writes about the document that stands in for the action – the diversity report that gets filed, the working group that meets quarterly, the statement of intent that lives on the website. The paper acknowledges the problem so that the institution doesn’t have to change. I have watched this happen in Reykjavík, in Oslo, in Helsinki. The geography changes; the mechanism is remarkably consistent.
I have participated in various Nordic diversity symposiums, where there are good conversations, honest moments, and a particular relief of being in a room where you do not have to explain yourself from the beginning. But then everyone returns home, and the structures remain. The symposium becomes the alibi: we are having the conversation. But the conversation and the structural change are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the more comfortable ways institutions avoid doing the harder work.
From the Outside In
Beyond the major institutions, new structures are being built from the outside in. Southnord, founded by Marcia Harvey Isaksson, is a nomadic triennial for Black and Afro-Nordic artists moving through the Nordic capitals, creating durable infrastructure where none previously existed. Black Archives Sweden, Jonelle Twum’s archival practice centered on Black presence and memory, functions as a living counter-narrative. And Peer Review itself is building frameworks for evaluation and critical discourse that established institutions have failed to sustain. These are structural interventions: built because the structures were absent, and because someone decided not to wait.
There are also signs of movement within institutions themselves. The recent appointment of Khanyisile Mbongwa at Amos Rex in Helsinki for example suggests that change, however overdue, is possible when leadership begins to shift. Such moments matter not because representation alone resolves structural inequity, but because decision-making changes when different lived experiences enter the room.
At the same time, progress remains fragile. The untimely death of Koyo Kouoh, the groundbreaking curator appointed to lead the 2026 Venice Biennale, was felt across the international art world as more than a personal loss. It was the loss of a rare and forceful institutional imagination, someone who expanded what global contemporary art could look like, whom it could center, and how it could be understood. Her absence is a reminder that transformation is often carried by individuals long before it is secured by systems.
I know the experience of being repeatedly the only brown person in a room, and especially in Iceland. What does it mean to be the only one where decisions are made, where the canon is debated, where funding is discussed? You become visible in the way that makes you invisible: seen as representative of something, not fully seen as yourself. Sara Ahmed writes that the diversity worker becomes a problem the moment they name the problem. You are included until you ask who else is being included.
This experience carries a specific weight over time. It accumulates. And that accumulation is what I mean by the tax of representation: the surcharge levied on practitioners whose presence is treated as inherently symbolic, who must spend energy making their legitimacy legible before they can get to the work itself. This cost is rarely visible to the institution being entered.
Homeplace
This is part of why I have made it my own work to put these questions into the room – not only through writing, but through the exhibitions themselves. Tracing Fragments (Gerðarsafn, 2023) brought together Frida Orupabo, Inuuteq Storch, Sasha Huber, and Abdullah Qureshi to ask how artists reclaim colonial and racial histories through acts of stitching, archiving, and re-imaging – realizing the brown, indigenous, and queer body on its own terms. CORPUS (Gerðarsafn, 2025) extended this through the lens of the body itself: through Jeannette Ehlers and Salad Hilowle blackness and embodies emerged as lived, historical, and political conditions, through the body as a site of inscription.
In my context in Iceland, I sometimes find myself asking myself, if I don’t put these questions into the room, who will? bell hooks described homeplace as the making of spaces where Black life could be affirmed against violence outside them. In institutional contexts where depletion is common, such spaces are not retreat but infrastructure. Toni Morrison once described racism as a machinery of distraction, it keeps you explaining your presence rather than doing the work itself. In institutions where legitimacy is unevenly distributed, that distraction becomes structural.
What I have found is that the making of space happens in small acts before it happens in institutions, in conversations after openings, in the deliberate choice to write something into a programme text that otherwise wouldn’t be there, in reaching across to the artist who is doing something the dominant conversation isn’t ready for yet. It happens in the rooms you make for yourself.
The Work
My curatorial practice has been shaped, but is not reducible to, this positional reality. The work I am most committed to – long-term artist collaboration, the building of trust, the conviction that the exhibition is only one moment in a much longer relationship – emerged partly from structural necessity and partly from a genuine belief about what curatorial practice can be at its best. The dominant model tips toward extraction: you engage with an artist for the duration of a show, and then you both move on.
Aftertime (The Living Art Museum, Sequences XII, 2025) was built on a different logic. Bringing together Sasha Huber, Santiago Mostyn, Sheida Soleimani, Lagos Studio Archives, and Ina Nian, the exhibition considered the lived experience and politics of time as they bear on marginalized communities and their histories. These are artists I have worked alongside over time; the exhibition felt possible because trust existed, because the thinking had already been shared. Work made from within a sustained relationship has a different quality, the care is in the texture.
Long-term collaboration also implies a particular relationship to place. In the Nordic countries, that attentiveness has meant engaging with communities of color that exist here and are largely invisible to the dominant art narrative, with the gap between our sense of country as small and remote and the actual complexity of who is living here now. Our children will come of age and look to the institutions that are supposed to reflect and hold their culture, and if nothing changes, they will not see themselves there – not in the collections, not in the leadership, not in the rooms where it is decided what Nordic art is and who gets to make it. That absence tells them something about where they belong, or don’t.
After the Naming
What I hope for my work as a curator to contribute is not a corrective, not a programme of inclusion that the institution can adopt and move on from, but something more structural: a different account of what Nordic art can hold, whose thinking gets to shape it, and what it becomes when the coordinates of who is in the room genuinely shift. Because that is ultimately what representation is about. Epistemology, rather than optics, whose knowledge is in the room. Whose way of seeing shapes what gets made and shown and written about and remembered.
Ahmed reminds us that to name a problem is not to create it. The problem was already there. What I don’t yet know is what comes after the naming – what the institution does with it, what I do with it, what it means in the meantime. Naming it will have to be enough for now.