Artist Talk: Jonelle Twum

Participants: Jonelle Twum, Tawanda Appiah

As part of GIBCA 2025 a hand that is all our hands combined, the Gothenburg Museum of Art welcomes artist and filmmaker Jonelle Twum for an evening of conversation about her artistic and curatorial practice together with curator Tawanda Appiah.

Twum’s work spans film, installation, sound, text, and theory, grounded in Black feminist thought and attentive to migration, memory, desire, collectivity, and the body. Through her ongoing project Black Archives Sweden (BAS), she examines the archive as a living, polyphonic space, one shaped by rupture as much as continuity, by absences as much as what is preserved.

In this talk, Twum will reflect on her newly commissioned work for the biennial, Broadcasts from the International Idleness Union, a speculative radio-inspired installation that proposes rest as a collective form of resistance and repair.

She will also speak about All Our Hands Combined, Black Archives Sweden’s two-part exhibition for GIBCA 2025. Featuring artists Kiluanji Kia Henda, Tiago Mena Abrantes, and Pamela Z, the exhibition explores shared narratives of refusal, care, and imagination across Black experience. From critiques of racial capitalism and its fractured subjectivities to breath as a generative method of survival, these artists’ contributions ask: What forms of resistance and rest carry us into otherwise futures?

Together, Twum’s artistic and curatorial work opens space to dwell in the pauses: in silences, in breath, in the unrecorded. It invites us to listen closely to what is often overlooked and to recognize memory and collective becoming as vital practices of political imagination.

Tawanda Appiah is a Zimbabwean curator, writer and researcher based in Malmö, Sweden. His research-centred practice often revisits history to make sense of the contemporary milieu. He is the curator at Skånes konstförening, alongside his independent practice, and previously held the position of Curator of Education & Public Programming at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Appiah has curated several exhibitions, public programmes and interventions including FLIGHT (Malmö Konsthall, 2023) which featured works by Kudzanai Chiurai, Frida Orupabo and Eric Magassa.