Welcoming our next resident Nicole Rafiki

Rafiki by Lindholmshøgda outside of Longyearbyen, September 2023

This month we are pleased to welcome our tenth resident this year, Nicole Rafiki.

Nicole Rafiki (b.1989) lives and works between South Africa and Norway. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki treats art making as a practice of remembrance, healing and cultural analysis.

Her images often employ artistic strategies that avoid a western anthropological gaze. Incorporporating symbolism, fables, and tools of visual storytelling and oral history, she invokes themes of forced migration and war ghosts, racialized perceptions of Blackness and femininity, and fraught colonial traditions of spatial power and temporal erasure.

As a child of the Kongolese diaspora with connections in various countries in Africa and Europe, she taps into pre-colonial forms of global interconnectedness and knowledge transfer.

Rafiki has been nominated by our key partner Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (NNKM) and will be staying at Artica until October. You can find out more about all the current and upcoming residents here.