Skuggminnen
Glass plates, text, light,15.5x4.3x0.2 cm, 2023
Shadow Memories consists of four glass plates with etched prose texts exploring intergenerational trauma. Based on personal experiences, the texts remain invisible in direct light and only appear when light is directed onto the surface, casting shadows on the wall where the words become readable. This interplay between light and shadow makes the hidden and suppressed visible, allowing for reflection and processing.
Originally written in Swedish the texts read:
"Mom said that my presence provokes her. That I'm breaking her, and that she cannot bear it."
"I will never forget when Grandma said that Mom was born cruel. That she could sense it even when she was pregnant."
"Sometimes I wonder if we are our parents' guilty conscience. A reminder of their own self-hatred."
"I pressed my face against her neck, wishing I could climb inside her body. That I could cut her ribcage open and exist underneath her skin."
Artificial womb
Photography mounted on dibond, 133x100 cm, 2023
This work presents a lamb developing inside an artificial womb, a scientific breakthrough enabling fetal growth outside the body. In dialogue with my other works, it serves as a counterpoint to the organic, highlighting the tension between technological progress and the fundamental experience of gestation.
This image raises questions of control and consequence: an external pregnancy allows for precise monitoring and potential disease prevention, but at what cost? What is lost in the pursuit of optimization—intimacy, attachment? The work reflects on technological intervention while also considering what is inevitably lost.
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Container
Blood, vial, 1X10x1cm, 2023
Container is a small test tube filled with blood, balancing on a large podium. An installation forming a minimalistic sculpture. It symbolizes containment and the potential danger that blood may carry. Giving a blood sample is a moment of unknowing—like existing in the space between exhaling and holding one’s breath
Jelly heart
Jelly heart, resin, 13,5x13,5 cm, 2025
Jelly Heart explores themes of preservation, artificiality, and mass consumption. The work consists of a small candy heart encased in resin—suspended in a permanent, untouchable state. The concept of containment and preservation is central to my practice, yet here, the choice of a synthetic, mass-produced confection shifts the meaning. The artificially colored, sugary gelatin heart stands in contrast to the organic elements in other works, such as the stretched fetal membrane and the scanned placenta. A universally recognized symbol of love, the heart is frozen in its plasticized form, unable to dissolve, be consumed, or decay. By elevating something so commonplace, Jelly Heart questions whether romantic love in Western culture is a social construction—commodified, mass-produced, and shaped by capitalist structures.
Black Square
Garbage bag on wooden frame, 30 x 30 x 10 cm, 2023
Black Square is a paraphrase of Malevich’s Black Square (1915), a work that sought to establish a new beginning for art. Malevich might have envisioned his black void as pure and absolute—but can abstraction ever be free?
The surface of this piece is a black plastic bag, a fragile yet resistant material. It carries connotations of concealment, protection, and disposability—echoing the way black plastic has been used to contain, isolate, and erase. During the AIDS crisis, bodies were buried in black plastic bags, stamped contaminated. The material itself becomes a barrier, both shielding and stigmatizing, preserving and discarding.
Unlike Malevich’s painted surface, this black square is not solid—it is a membrane, a skin that can be punctured, torn, or peeled away. And yet, behind it, there is nothing. No deeper truth, no hidden image—only an empty wooden frame, a structure without content.
Originally titled Black Square Contaminated, the work reflects a fear of what lies beyond the surface—only to reveal that behind it, there is nothing at all.
Apart
Glass sculptures, 11 x 8 x 17 cm, 2023
Apart consists of two glass sculptures—a uterus and a fetus—placed on a custom-made glass podium. The podium becomes an integral part of the work, as the light passing through the glass enhances its transparency and fragility.
Freud suggested that love is, at its core, a form of homesickness—a desire to return to the mother’s womb. Apart reflects this inconsolable, existential longing for reunion.
Untitled
Stainless steel, 55 x 30 x 30 cm, 2024
Untitled is a stainless steel sculpture defined by its sharp, angular form—familiar yet unsettling. The shape recalls a needle, a bore, or an industrial fragment, forms designed for precision but carrying an inherent sense of threat. Its stark, aggressive lines serve as a silent warning, heightening a sense of tension and alertness.
Though seemingly universal, the form is rooted in a personal memory—my mother’s fall onto a steel spike while working with animals. This experience is also intertwined with my own fear of falling and impalement.
Despite its simplicity, the shape remains ambiguous—both functional and ominous. Untitled examines the fine line between strength and fragility, utility and danger, reflecting on how sharpness—both literal and metaphorical—permeates our surroundings and shapes our sense of risk and control.
Untitled
Metal, glass, microscope slides, 112x110x60cm, 2022
Untitled consists of a welded metal table with a large glass surface, upon which rows of empty microscope slides are meticulously arranged. Their repetition creates a sense of monumentality, while their intended function—to hold and reveal the unseen—suggests an ongoing search for answers.
The slides, usually used for scientific examination, remain blank, evoking both potential discovery and absence. Their structured yet vacant presence highlights the tension between analysis and uncertainty, precision and emptiness. Through the interplay of metal, glass, and repetition, the work explores the act of looking, questioning what is there and what remains elusive.
YES
Installation, microscope, text, 2023
This work explores the paradoxes and complexities of language. By placing YES within the microscopic field, it examines not only what is seen but how meaning is constructed. It embodies the act of searching—how a YES can affirm a desire but also signify something final and definitive.
Frequency
Hair, pins, 22 x 32x4 cm, 2025
Frequency is a piece in which I have mounted one of my own hairs—curly and afro-textured—between two pins. The resulting shape resembles an EKG curve, the visual representation of the heart's electrical activity.
By using my own hair, I explore what is deeply rooted in my identity and what is a symbol of life's pulse and rhythm.
Frequency invites reflection on how our bodies communicate through their own frequencies—our hearts, our hair, our skin—and how these become stories in their own right.
Invasion
Video installation, four stacked monitors, 2023
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Invasion is a four-channel video installation that explores the relentless violation of the body—by disease, by parasites, by the unstoppable forces of nature. The imagery is displayed across stacked monitors, relics of outdated technology.
The top screen displays microscopic images of viruses—pathogens infiltrating their host. The second monitor shows cells, some under attack by cancer. The third screen is filled with white noise, an interference, a visual static—the chaos of breakdown and distortion. The lowest screen plays footage of Dorylus ants in frantic motion, surging in a collective, unstoppable swarm.
As a child in Tanzania, I was told about our puppies that were eaten by these ants—crawling inside their bodies, consuming them from within. This memory, intertwined with imagery of disease and decay, forms the core of Invasion.
The rapid flow of images, the relentless movement of the ants, and the flickering static of white noise create a sense of unease—an anxious, frenetic, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. The interference merges with the chaotic visuals, amplifying the unsettling reality of bodily vulnerability—of invasion at every level, from the cellular to the existential.
Mother and I
Mixed media, used bandages on A4 paper, text, 2018
Mother and I is an intimate reflection on proximity and distance, on care and contamination, on what can and cannot be shared. The piece consists of two used bandages—one belonging to my mother, the other one to myself—placed side by side on a sheet of paper. One bandage carries HIV; the other one doesn’t. Alongside them, two memories are inscribed on a separate sheet:
Trying to see if there is light or dark hairs in the razor.
"If you have a wound and I have a wound, our blood must never mix."
The first is a quiet recollection—an almost unconscious gesture, searching for traces of the other. The second is a sentence my mother often told me as a child, a way to explain her HIV diagnosis.
The bandages, marked by pain and healing, act as symbols of both separation and connection. Mother and I navigates the tension between closeness and distance, light and darkness, and the complexity of meeting at points of vulnerability.
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Esther
Polaroid, 10x10 cm, 2024
Esther & No Life consists of two polaroid photographs that explore the female experience of reproduction.
The first image was taken at the request of my friend Esther, who asked me to document her pregnancy. It embodies the anticipation and becoming of life. However, to fully engage with the concept of life, I felt it was essential to confront its opposite. The second image shows a hand holding menstrual blood—an act of documentation, a quiet recognition of the loss of potential life—a miscarriage.
Together, these images reflect the inescapable relationship women have with their bodies and their cycles, irrespective of the desire for motherhood.
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No Life
Polaroid, 10x10 cm, 2024
Membrane
Amniotic sac, 30x30cm, 2023
In this work, I have stretched and dried an amniotic sac from a horse into a perfect square. Fragile yet resilient, its translucent surface once regulated the exchange between mother and offspring, shielding life from external threats while supporting fetal development. Like the placenta, it is both a boundary and a connection—a threshold between protection and exposure. Historically, animal membranes have served as barriers, used as contraception to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. This work reflects on the concept and function of the barrier—its possibilities and limitations.
Placenta
Scanned placenta, 30x30cm, 2023
A placenta, donated to me for examination, has been scanned and mounted onto a rigid surface. This work captures a suspended moment of connection, where nourishment, transmission, and protection converge. The placenta serves as both a passage and a barrier—a lifeline between two bodies, shielding against what must not pass, yet vulnerable to breaches that might allow unwanted elements through. Through this examination, I explore the temporary yet powerful nature of this organ, which exists solely to nourish and protect the developing offspring.
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Noise
Video installation, 2021
Noise is a multi-channel video installation consisting of four monitors placed within a confined space, where overlapping sounds form a chaotic symphony. A baby monkey’s scream, the rattling of a toy bicycle, bursts of laughter—interwoven with a recorded conversation where my mother asks my older sister, as a child, if she feels different from other children. Meanwhile, she films Maasai children riding a wooden bicycle, juxtaposed with my sister’s pristine new bike, effortlessly pulled by a rope.
Additionally, the video includes scenes from a zoo, where we watch snakes in enclosures, and zoo staff poke at the snakes, provoking them for the amusement of tourists.
The work delves into human power structures, drawing parallels between human control over animals and the ongoing negotiation of belonging in postcolonial contexts. It invites reflection on the exploitation of both humans and animals, the ways in which power and control permeate the spaces where humans and creatures meet—an unsettling commentary on the dynamics of dominance and spectacle.
The Interview – Outer Gaze
Video installation, 1:57 min, 2018
For seven years, from early childhood into my teens, a documentary filmmaker followed my family. The project was originally intended as a portrait of my father, a narrative designed to support his case to remain in Sweden. But as the filmmaker searched for something redeeming in him, she found nothing she could stand behind. Her focus shifted—away from him, toward my mother, toward us. When the original premise, framing him as the victim of an unjust system, collapsed, the film remained unfinished.
I felt relieved that the film was never completed. Not because of the larger implications, but because I didn’t want people to see the interior of our home. It is strange what the mind fixates on—details, rather than the weight of the larger narrative. But that was how I felt then, as a child.
Exposure, both voluntary and involuntary, remains central to this work. The Interview – Outer Gaze reclaims that history, reducing the image to language alone. The absence of visuals shifts the focus entirely to what is said—allowing the film to unfold as imagined images in the mind of the viewer. By presenting only fragments, the work serves as a reminder that no story is ever fully graspable.