Soul Service 6 March

With Soul Service Tensta konsthall welcomes the public to an evening with music, food and conversations. The overarching theme is shared knowledge of survival and of building structures for care and healing. How can we disrupt the colonial processes and strengthen the emotional and cultural support required to imagine a different world order?The series Soul Service is a part of the exhibition Imagine an after and will take place during the spring 2025. The program is curated by Marie-Louise Richards as part of the course Reconstructions at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in collaboration with Tensta konsthall. In English

The event is free of charge, but registration is needed. Please rsvp to paulina@tenstakonsthall.se no later than March 3.

Program:

Burcu Sahin, Maryam Elnozahy and Sofia Jernberg
Food by Fahyma Alnablsi, Gazelle Kianoush and Asha Mohamed

Using memory, fragments, and loss of meaning not only as way of speaking, but also a source of knowledge, poet and literary critic Burcu Sahin works with the silences and spaces of language and will perform a poetry reading that explores the ‘silent texts’ that been passed down and moved across space, time, and generations.

In her lecture, curator researcher and writer Mariam Elnozahy will explore the role of ritual in contemporary art. Focused primarily on critical, community-based artistic practices, she examines the role of the art space in creating ‘sacred spaces’ in service of community.

Composer and singer Sofia Jernberg is interested in developing the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Her singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a natural singing style. Taking her own identity as point of departure, she will give a musical performance that reflects on origin, belonging and communion.

About tonight's guests:
Burcu Sahin is a poet and literary critic based in Stockholm. Her first poetry collection Embroideries (Litmus Press, 2024), translated into English by Jennifer Hayashida was originally published in 2018 and awarded with the Winter Prize by the Society of the Nine, and the Catapult Prize for Best Literary Debut by the Swedish Writers’ Union. Her second poetry collection Blodbok (Albert Bonniers Förlag) was published in Swedish in 2022, and deals with memory culture and colonial history through an inventory of the archive from The Swedish Institute of Race Biology (1918-1956), still remaining at Uppsala University. For this work she received the publishing house Natur & Kultur scholarship. She has also written the chapbook Beloved Siblings (Autor, 2019) that goes into dialogue with the essay Speaking in Tongues by Gloria Anzaldúa, which she has translated into Swedish and published as a chapbook (Modernista, 2024). She is also a literary critic and essayist whose work has been published in literary magazines and papers such as Aftonbladet, Lyrikvännen, Kritiker, Ord&Bild and Provins.

Sofia Jernberg, born in Ethiopia and brought up in Ethiopia, Vietnam and Sweden, is a singer and composer.Central to her work are unconventional techniques and sounds with focus on the human acoustic voice. Touching themes like identity, internationality, origin, belonging as well as a strong belief in communion and collaboration. Music theatre and contemporary opera play a significant part in her artistic oeuvre. She has received several commissions as a composer and collaborates with choreographers, visual artists and film makers.

Mariam Elnozahy is a curator, researcher, and writer. She currently serves as the Artistic Director of Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden where her program “Sacred Spaces” invites questions of religion and society in the realm of artistic production. She previously curated exhibitions in Cairo at the Townhouse Gallery as well as in London, Oslo, Uppsala, Amsterdam, Jeddah, and Basel. Her work has explored histories of globalization, development, and resource extraction. She has been published in Frieze Magazine, The Markaz Review, Hyperallergic, and MadaMasr. She was in residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL from 2022-2023 investigating the archive of Royal Dutch Shell to understand the relationship between arts and extractive industries in the twentieth century.

Photo: Chai Saeidi (Burcu Sahin), Munir Atalla (Maryam Elnozahy), Jon Edergren (Sofia Jernberg).