Artist
Nayara Leite
Nayara Leite (b. 1989) is a Brazilian artist and writer based in Bergen, Norway. She holds an MFA from the Bergen Art Academy and an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication.
Nayara works across text, performance, analogue photography, film and installation. Through autobiographical narrative, political news, archival material and letters to close friends, she produces a portrayal of the reality in which the LGBTQ+ community lives in Brazil and in Norway.
She has exhibited and/or held performances at Bergen Kunsthall, Palmera, Lydgalleriet, Isotop, Bergen Kjøtt and KODE 2 in Bergen; Preus Museum in Horten; Studio 17 in Stavanger; Oslo Negativ, Kunstnerforbundet and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo; and Momentum Biennale in Moss.
In Search of Rainbows
Commissioned by Preus Museum (The National Museum for Photography in Norway), In Search of Rainbows investigates the situation of the queer community in north-eastern Brazil when Jair Bolsonaro was the country’s president, and how the national flag has become a symbol for the right-wing party.
Shot in Fortaleza, Brazil, in January 2022, the short film depicts my search for places that proudly displayed rainbow flags outside their premises. With the challenging political situation that dominated the country, a visible rainbow flag was a protest against the homophobic government of Bolsonaro. Through this search, I found something completely unexpected instead. In Search of Rainbows merges political views with my own experiences. My first rainbow flag was also part of the installation. By hanging the flag on a hammock hook in the exhibition room, I referred to my coming out story and how I dealt with my Catholic family.
Part of the project – my first rainbow flag, a hammock hook, stills from the film and a poem – was shown at Preus Museum for their Over Regnbuen exhibition. The short film had a special screening at Oslo Negativ in the autumn 2022 and was later selected to be part of Momentum Biennale in 2023.
Link to watch the short film: https://vimeo.com/749469178 (Password: forabolsonaro)
Artist duo Bela:Hagren has extensively explored traditional photography in its multi-layered past, from the technologization of the medium for the sake of science to its more creative uses. Bela:Hagren often address the complexity of storytelling of photographic history, which can’t be reduced only to images, because it is embedded in the cultural context, circulation, and economic infrastructure of the given time. More recently, they have been working on a project about the monopoly of manufacturing paper in the Eastern bloc and the toxic residue left behind by photographic production.
Joel Karppanen is a self-taught artist working with experimental photography to address class and labor issues and explore the deviousness of a hierarchical economy with issues of privilege, provenance, and access. In his most known work, Beyond Pitkäsilta (Metropolis) (2021–2023), he has worked with “donating” time, which is about putting himself to service or replace someone and giving them time so that they could have the same access or opportunities as himself for a limited period. In that specific work, he addresses how art is still for the few.
Nayara Leite is an artist and an advocator for the LBGTQI+ community across both Norway and Brazil. In her project In Search of Rainbows (2022) Leite explores the different flags displayed in the north of Brazil. While a growing number of Brazilian flags favored under the then-president Jair Messias Bolsonaro led to notions of nationalism, persecution, and homophobia, the number of pride flags on display had almost vanished, symbolizing growing discrimination for non-normalized individuals.
Sheung Yiu is a visual artist and a researcher focusing on how image sensitivity is increasing the complexity of algorithms but also bringing back old tropes of eugenics and phrenology, reactivating traumas of a colonial past based on provenance of geographies, genders, and other made-up exclusionary politics. (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How To Read a Face (2023 - ongoing), is one such work where Yiu plays with these AI machines and their “learnings” to visualize their discriminative and presumptive politics.
Yujie Zhou is an artist who works with expanded photography, publishing, textiles, and performativity to contest censorship. They have worked on legibility and illegibility as forms of protest through language. Panoptic Segmentation (2021-ongoing) parallels the 18th-century disciplinary system, the panopticon, invented to make bodies more docile in prison surveillance system, and a similar system adopted in computation to break down objects into stratified readable components.