HELSINKI.- The exhibition's title draws inspiration from a story in Minna Salami's book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, in which two explorers visit the same mountain but return with completely different accounts of what they have seen. The story suggests that reality itself appears diminished when only certain perspectives are sustained and believed, and of what can become visible when other ways of understanding the world are allowed to take part.

The exhibition's artists explore urban environments and how structures within different landscapes bring people closer together or set them apart. Through African and Afro-Nordic perspectives, questions of memory, migration, identity, and movement are raised, with the urban landscape as a recurring stage. Through varying forms of expression—sound and light, glass and sand, textiles and scents—the artists give these themes a multifaceted and sensory expression.

"As curators, we were interested in the artists' multifaceted narratives, which are constantly reshaped as they move and work across different places. Each of the works in the exhibition returns, in its own way, to different built spaces and landscapes, and reflects on how these affect people. The urban environment in particular—the city with its many layers—recurs in many different forms throughout the exhibition. The works themselves are also layered on and within one another, creating new paths and worlds in the exhibition space in an organic and surprising way, like an ever-growing city," say curators Katariina Timonen and Marcia Harvey Isaksson.

The artists

Emeka Ogboh has driven the yellow Danfo bus – an iconic form of public transport in Lagos – across Northern Europe, through Copenhagen and Stockholm to the exhibition galleries of Amos Rex in Helsinki. Along the way, the bus has recorded human encounters through sound, taste, scent and touch.

Sandra Mujinga’s work Skin to Skin creates a world of its own, where different degrees of visibility and invisibility merge into a green glow beneath the museum’s great mound. Meanwhile Finnish-Congoleseartist Liisa-Irmelen Liwata creates an inner landscape in her work Oloseutu, exploring the meaning of nationality from her position at the intersection of several cultures.

The exhibition features five artists working in the Nordic region, two of whom are based in Finland. For most of the participating artists, this is their first time exhibiting in Finland.

Artists in the exhibition:

Igshaan Adams | Akinbode Akinbiyi | Loulou Cherinet | Adji Dieye | Jeannette Ehlers | Lungiswa Gqunta | Liisa-Irmelen Liwata | Ibrahim Mahama | Sandra Mujinga | Emeka Ogboh and Karl Ohiri.