How to manifest solidarity today? When do we gather beyond differences and who do we chose to solidarize with? What norms or furthers solidarity? And how do citizens maintain the freedom to solidarize?

Josefine Wikström, philosopher, Moshtari Hilal and Sinthujan Varatharajah, authors of Hierarchies of Solidarity, meet around these questions on the opening day of the 13th edition of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, with the title a hand that is all our hands combined.

Josefine Wikström is a researcher and critic working on the intersection between cultural theory and post-Kantian philosophy with a particular focus on performance and dance within contemporary art. She is a Senior Lecturer in Dance Theory at Uniarts and also teaches regularly in Aesthetics at Södertörn Högskola and Gothenburg University. She completed her PhD-theses in Philosophy at the CRMEP in London in 2017 with the title Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score: Towards New concept of performance in art. Together with Kim West and Gustav Strandberg, Wikström is currently working on the research project Autonomy, Culture, Action: On Culture’s Spheres of Political Action in the Neoliberal Welfare State.

Moshtari Hilal is a visual artist, writer and curator based in Hamburg and Berlin. Hilal studied Islamic Studies and Political Science with a focus on Gender and Decolonial Theory in Hamburg, Berlin and London. She is co-founder and co-curator of AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts and History) collective. Her essayistic debut “Hässlichkeit” (Ugliness, 2023) was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize for non-fiction. Together with political geographer Sinthujan Varatharajah, Hilal published 2024 at Wirklichkeit Books the book “Hierachies of Solidarity“ and 2022 “English in Berlin – Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society“. As part of ngbk Berlin Hilal co-curated the 2023 research symposium CCC (Curating Through Conflict with Care).

சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) is an independent researcher and essayist based in Berlin. The focus of their work is statelessness, mobility and geographies of power with a special focus on infrastructure, logistics and architecture. In 2020 Varatharajah participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art with the exhibition “how to move an arch”. They are the co-curator of the Berlin-based multimedia event series “dissolving territories: cultural geographies of a new eelam” and a former Open City Fellow of the Open Society Foundations.