MA Forum in collaboration with LIO: Nina Mangalanayagam
Through this MA Forum and performative lecture, Nina Mangalanayagam invites us into the processes, methods and negotiations shaping Colouring-in Sweden, an artistic research project funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project explores traces of free Black women in the colonial archives of St Barthélemy, a Caribbean island under Swedish rule for nearly a century.
Moving between archival research, personal identification and artistic practice, Mangalanayagam investigates the complex and often contradictory position of the “free Black woman”. Drawing on Blank Pages, an exhibition at Bildmuseet, she explores letter writing as a way of engaging with historical fragments, imagining alternative narratives and questioning what the archive allows us to know.
The lecture offers an introduction to artistic research as a process of questioning, making and negotiating uncertainty. What can art make room for when archives remain silent, conceal or leave gaps? And how might artistic practice become a space for testing contradictions rather than resolving them?
Details here.
Nina Mangalanayagam is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research and artistic practice explore hybridity, colonial legacies, and belonging through photography and moving image.
Her current research spans two distinct projects. In collaboration with Louise Wolthers at the Hasselblad Foundation, she is developing Botanics and Symbiosis – Expanding Photography, which builds on their earlier joint research project, Photography and the Glitch. This previous collaboration resulted in the exhibition and publication Bugs and Metamorphosis – Glitching Photography (2025).
Alongside this collaborative work, Mangalanayagam is completing Colouring-in Sweden, exploring how artistic practice can engage with the gaps, silences and contradictions of colonial archives.
Nina Mangalanayagam, ‘Ulrica’ (film still), 2026. Courtesy the artist
MA Forum is a seminar series on artistic research, hosted by HDK-Valand in collaboration with L’Internationale Online. Through invited guests, the series explores different dimensions of artistic research. The lectures are free and open to all.
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