6.9.2025 - 17.2.2026

Sarah Nakiito & Liisa-Irmelen Liwata: Still I Rise

Artist Sarah Nakiito will hold a duo exhibition with Liisa-Irmelen Liwata at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki in Fall 2025. The exhibition is curated by Elham Rahmati and Vidha Saumya.

Taking its title from Maya Angelou’s iconic poem And Still I Rise (1978) the exhibition weaves together two practices rooted in resilience, ancestral memory, and the ever-evolving act of self-definition. Their works navigate the emotional and political terrain of survival, where defiant hope, tactile materiality, and deeply personal mythologies converge. As their practices intersect, viewers are drawn into a dynamic space: one of witnessing, reflection, and quiet rebellion.

Sarah Nakiito, a former migration researcher turned artist, utilizes textiles and performance to navigate the experience of being a black woman in a diaspora. Her work delves into the themes of resilience, ancestral knowledge, and the wounds left by colonialism. Sarah Nakiito’s practice is shaped by the duality of her lived experience between Sweden and Uganda. Her works examine contrasting cultural responses to crisis, drawing attention to the instinctive collectivism in migrant and diasporic communities versus the individualism often present in Western contexts. This tension is embodied through her use of bark cloth: Olubugo, a traditional Ugandan material interwoven with the inner bark of the linden tree. This fusion creates a living, breathing textile—one that charts the convergence of Nakiito’s layered identities and histories. Her work resists erasure, not only honoring tradition but actively sustaining it as a contemporary, evolving practice.

Liisa-Irmelen Liwata, working with ceramics as a canvas, creates layered surfaces that echo the intermingling of cultures and experiences. Her tactile works evoke a sense of the body as a living map, marked by ancestral connections and the land one inhabits. In Seinäjoki Kunsthalle’s exhibition Liisa-Irmelen Liwata’s work turns inward and skyward. Rooted in the concept of napa—the Finnish word for “belly button”—her practice explores the navel as both physical origin and central point of orientation. This duality becomes a metaphorical compass, guiding an exploration of cultural identity, bodily memory, and belonging. Through symbolic instruments of navigation—compasses, celestial charts, and “belly button stars”—Liwata constructs a personal cartography. Her work traces constellations in the Finnish and Congolese sky, mapping parallel cosmic landscapes that reflect her own hybridity.

“We are excited to curate this exhibition which highlights the common threads that bind the works of Sarah Nakiito and Liisa-Irmelen Liwata. These threads include a deep connection to the body, a celebration of craft traditions, and a critical exploration of the self in relation to place and history. This exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the multifaceted nature of identity and the enduring strength found in shared narratives.” – Elham Rahmati and Vidha Saumya.

 

ARTISTS

Liisa-Irmelen Liwata is a Finnish-Congolese visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. In her works, she uses sculpture and text to discuss the connections between the body, land and language. Having grown up at the crossroads of several cultures, Liwata is interested in exploring that point where existence overlaps. She works mostly with ceramics using a painterly technique, creating images on clay surfaces by pressing and sliding different coloured clays. The method is a combination of printmaking, collage work and finger painting.

Liwata has graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2024. She has a BA degree from Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture in 2019 with studies also at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Her latest group exhibitions include the MFA degree show “Kuvan Kevät” at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (2024), “Perceive sea, dunes, mountains in move” in 198 CAL Gallery, London (2023) and “Solar Noon” at Taattisten Tila (2023).

Sarah Nakiito (Uganda) is visual artist based in Malmö, Sweden who works mainly with textiles and performance. Her work is intuitive, empathetic and mostly thematic with a focus on collaboration and the human condition and collaboration.

Before becoming an artist, Nakiito worked for 15 years in a professional capacity with people in crisis at local, state and international level and studied the field at the East African Community (EAC) headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (on legal guilt and repatriation) and UNHCR in Kenya. She has a BA in International Migration & Ethnic Relationships from Malmö University in 2008.

Her artistic practice navigates through multiple references and fields of knowledge on how a black female body can navigate through it all. Her life and works share experiences of forced migration, blackness, feminism, diaspora, queer identity and colonial wounds— all this haunts her works and collaborations in search for and the development of decolonial art practices.

 

CURATORS

Elham Rahmati (b. 1989, Tehran) is a visual artist and independent curator based in Helsinki. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN, an independent online monthly magazine at the cusp of art, criticality, and love. In 2019 and 2020, she worked as a curator and producer at the Academy of Moving People & Images (AMPI), an independent film school in Helsinki. Prior to that, she worked as a curator at Third Space. Rahmati holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating, & Contemporary Art from Aalto University.

Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna) is an artist-poet. In her work, she weaves through notions of exile and utopia, questioning the norms of aesthetics and socio-political ecologies. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN Magazine and a founding member of the Museum of Impossible Forms.