Name: Artist talk: Santiago Mostyn
Start: 2024-10-24T18:30:00+02:00
End: 2024-10-24T20:00:00+02:00
Location: Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö, Sweden

This event will be held in English and fika will be warmly provided.
Please join us for an artist talk and screening with Santiago Mostyn. His solo exhibition, Language Against Identity, is currently on view and uses the language of images in an attempt to understand how they carry, extend and challenge established history.
Santiago Mostyn’s work spans years and in this conversation we will collectively watch a unique version of his video, Language Against Identity (2024), followed by a presentation which will culminate in a conversation with curator, Tawanda Appiah.
The video traces the effects of geographic and cultural displacement by focusing on two case studies of animals that were forcibly taken away from southern Africa and put on display in northern Europe. The first is that of Bibi, a female elephant born in Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s, who was shipped to the GDR as a baby and still lives in captivity in Germany. The second is a museum collection of African birds housed in the small town of Vänersborg. The birds were captured by a Swedish settler, Axel Wilhelm Eriksson Sr. (1846–1901) in South West Africa (later Namibia) in the late 1800s, and have been on continuous display for about 120 years.
Mostyn’s practice is prolific and straddles the line between mediums and geographies. He employs an intuitive process, emphasising the meeting point between embodied knowledge and the rational mind. In his films, installations, and performances, there is an insistence to unravel archives and the production of knowledge, especially through images. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2024-2025 where he is working on a new film script and researching the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) through the lens of Black radicalism. Together with artist Susanna Marcus Jablonski, he has been commissioned by the City of Malmö to create an anti-racist monument, which will be inaugurated in the second half of 2025.
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Artist bio:
Santiago Mostyn’s practice foregrounds narrative entanglements in pursuit of new understandings of place, both in a cultural and psychic sense. Mostyn has long been interested in the interplay of music, narrative and the embodied self, with works manifesting as films, exhibitions and curatorial projects.

Mostyn received a B.A. from Yale University and M.A. from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Recent exhibitions include After the Sun at Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2024), The Threshold is a Prism at Kulturhuset, Stockholm (2023), Mare Amoris / Sea of Love at Queensland Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane (2023) and Dream One at Södertälje Konsthall, Södertälje (2022).
Photo: Värnersborg's Museum Archive