6.9.2025 - 7.2.2026

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.

Still I Rise -exhibition at Vintti space, photo. Krista luoma

Sarah Nakiito, a former migration scholar 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.

Liisa-Irmelen Liwata’s work at the Still I Rise exhibition, photo Krista Luoma

“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.

Read the exhibition guide

ARTISTS

Liisa-Irmelen Liwata is a Finnish-Congolese visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Liwata uses sculpture and writing to explore the relationship people have with the land from nationalistic and geographical perspectives. Her pieces feature lyricism between the body, the land and language and the liminal nature of being.

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‘s artistic practice is deeply rooted in an ongoing exploration of the body – her own, others’, and imagined or organic bodies that exist beyond fixed definitions. Nakiito is drawn to the ways in which bodies are shaped by, and respond to, the environments they inhabit – both physically and symbolically. And the inherent need for healing.

The work operates in the borderlands of textiles, installation, costume design, performance and video where Nakiito explores corporeality, memory and resistance in relation to colonial and inherited structures. Sarah’s material-based work also draws on historical textile traditions, hand-dyeing, and craft techniques rooted in subaltern knowledge. Using recycled and natural materials such as wool, cotton, silk and wood, she references domestic labor and the circulation of resources shaped by colonial and patriarchal histories.

The practice is interdisciplinary and moves between traditional craft techniques, and spatial expressions such as scent, sound and ritual gesture – the personal is intertwined with historical, political and social layers through an exploration of storytelling techniques and narrative structures.

 

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.