Rafiki Rafiki
(She/her)
Address: Atelier Kunstnerforbundet, Kjeld Stubs gate 3, 0160 Oslo
Floor: 3
Room number: 1
The studio is open Sunday 27 April from 12-17
Rafiki’s interdisciplinary artworks move between photography and bead work, textiles and text, and the use of memorial objects old and new. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki treats art-making as a practice of remembrance, healing, and cultural analysis.
Her images often employ artistic strategies that avert a western anthropological gaze. Incorporating symbolisms, fables, and tools of visual storytelling and oral history, she invokes themes of forced migration and war ghosts, racialized perceptions of Blackness and femininity, and fraught colonial traditions of spatial power and temporal erasure.
Mixed media:photography, bead work, textiles, recycled materials
Silence is the Loudest Sound in the Universe (2022)
digital photography
Photo documentation
Alone, Together Like Beads on a String series (2023 - )
part of "Skakke Folkedrakter" exhibition
Strong Is the Neck that Carries a Powerful Mind,
Rafiki, in collaboration with Patrick Bongoy, framed diptych (reused rubber tyre and door frame, digital photo print, glass beads,
fishing line), 2023-2024
In my studio
In my studio you can hang out, drink some tea (maybe some wine too) and get to know my work better, especially my project Future Forest Congo. I am in the process of planting a living monument consisting of 60,000 trees in memory of the victims of war and conflict in Kongo. Come by and find out how you can contribute :)
Planned projects and exhibitions
Skakke folkedrakter,
1 April – 25 May:
Hordaland Kunstsenter
13 June – 30 September:
Hadeland Folkemuseum
Veien Hjem Igjen,
28 May – 13 July
Buskerud Kunstsenter
CV
Founder of Rafiki Art Initiatives, an Oslo-based not-for-profit hybrid platform and community that centers on the experiences and needs of BIPOC+ art practitioners in Norway and the Nordics. Rafiki is one of the Atelier Kunstnerforbundet Artists 2024-2026