In a performative lecture, Nina Mangalanayagam invites the audience into her artistic research project Colouring-in Sweden. The project explores traces of free Black women in historical documents from St Barthélemy, a Caribbean island that was a Swedish colony for almost a hundred years. From the position of “the free Black woman”, which Mangalanayagam investigates both through the archives and through a personal identification, she tests letter-writing as a way of telling, remembering, and imagining other histories. In Mangalanayagam’s exhibition Blank Pages at Bildmuseet, the question is posed: What can art make room for when the archives fall silent, conceal, or leave gaps?

After the lecture, a conversation follows between Nina Mangalanayagam and Arazo Arif, who through writing workshops invites others to imagine and speculate around the stories the archives do not tell. In the conversation, Arif and Mangalanayagam will discuss the role of violence in art and writing, how we can approach hidden or forgotten histories, and how art and literature can create space to test contradictions, without necessarily having to resolve them.

The programme starts at 17:45, followed by a conversation.

Welcome!

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Nina Mangalanayagam is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research and visual practice explore hybridity, colonial legacies, and belonging through photography and moving image. She is currently working on a collaborative research project together with Louise Wolthers at the Hasselblad Foundation: Botanics and Symbiosis – Expanding Photography. This continues their earlier research Photography and the Glitch, which included the exhibition and publication Bugs and Metamorphosis – Glitching Photography (2025). She is also working on a three-year artistic research project, “Colouring-In Sweden”, funded by the Swedish Research Council, focusing on stories of women in Sweden’s colonial history on the island of St Barthélemy.

Arazo Arif is a poet, author, screenwriter, and director. She made her debut with the poetry collection mörkret inuti och fukten at Albert Bonniers Förlag and has since published essays, poems, and short stories, as well as writing for radio, film, and TV. Her practice often revolves around questions of power, migration, identity, memory, and how historical and societal events continue to shape people’s lives and relationships.

https://www.ninamanga.com

https://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/utstallningar/2026/nina-mangalanayagam–tomma-ark

Photography: Nina Mangalanayagam, Portrait Elisabeth Toll, Malin Gabriella Nordin