In connection with the June Exhibition 2026: Shifting Coordinates, newly commissioned texts grounded in the participants’ practices and reflections form a contemporary and situated anthology that opens for further reflection. Writers: Daría Sól Andrews, Haweya Jama, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and Lara Okafor.
Khanyisile Mbongwa, Black Geographic Imagination in the Nordics
Editor: Dr. Uhuru Phalafala
ABSTRACT
If we think of Black visual culture as a form of moving cartography, then in the Nordic region the coordinates are not fixed—they drift across histories of neutrality, welfare, colonial entanglements, migration, and silence. What emerges is less a stable geography than a set of tensions, gaps, and reorientations.
In accepting Peer Review's invitation to engage with their exhibition Shifting Coordinates through a text-based article, I am interested in entering the project as a witnessing body—one that practices ancestral and forensic listening as an embodied curatorial method. From this position, the work becomes one of tracing and indexing: attending closely to what emerges, what is spoken, what is withheld, and what continues to shift.
My curiosity lies in engaging with how Peer Review holds and articulates its desires as a collective, and in listening for the Black fabulations, gestures, and speculative movements that surface through the exhibition. Rather than producing a conventional review, the intention is to develop an indexing text—one that gathers, organizes, and reflects on the language, framings, and sensibilities that the project generates.
If we consider Black visual culture within this context, what are the shifting coordinates of the geographies of Blackness in the Nordic? What questions emerge from this locale? The Nordic context does not simply host Blackness; it actively reshapes its meanings, its visibility, and its legibility.
This text approaches a cartography of Blackness in the Nordic not as a mapping of territory, but as a tracing of conditions of appearance—where Blackness flickers between absence and insistence, between the global and the hyperlocal, between being unspoken and overexposed. Within this, Shifting Coordinates becomes a convening space through which a situated language—shaped by and for Black people in the Nordics—can be sensed, articulated, and indexed.
Through this process, the final text will take the form of an index—mapping emergent vocabularies, thematic constellations, and curatorial framings that arise from the exhibition and its surrounding encounters. The aim is to produce a text that not only reflects on the exhibition but also contributes to the development of a language through which Blackness in the Nordic can be more precisely and expansively thought.
Publisert 28. september 2026
Sist oppdatert 28. september 2026