ideally, the biryani that brings us all together
(2025)
author(s): Saniya Jafri
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This Exposition is a brief ironic comment on the ongoing degradation, commodification, and colonisation of food and its many dimensions — recipes, ingredients, context — and a reflection on the territorial definitions that shape identity, in this case of South Asians and the Global South, once bound together as a people and still united in the brieftopian world of the Author’s Greatest Biryani: an amalgamative dish of political and cultural reproductions, drenched in time, where old and new contest identity.
Through a conversational, autoethnographic lens, the exposition blends historical, colonial, and territorial reflections, using Biryani as both departure point and metaphor for shared identity and dislocation. Visual collages — archival, familial, and sourced — act as probes connecting memory, culture, and belonging. Ultimately, the work offers the Author’s Greatest Biryani as a living document of generational knowledge and a utopian gesture, inviting both insiders and outsiders to gather around a dish transcending borders and time.
Splitting Mammalian Weeds: Monster for a Memory
(2023)
author(s): Shana De Villiers
published in: Research Catalogue
This is not a thesis of trying to mine a singular understanding, but a collecti(ion)(ve) body of research composed into a gesture. Other than my memories, I have only grazed the surface of the topics I will discuss (even then, memories are at the fragile grace of synaptic connections) There are holes here, tears that will take a lifetime to mend. As I will mention later, I am not interested in a singular whole. Holes, however, are curious places with a warm spot for happenings, so I am okay with the holes.
All patchworks are several and my obsession with their cobbled nature does not mean there are no moments of stillness and clarity. This work is an archive of the muddiness of being and I invite you to draw parallels with your own logic as you stumble through this patchy, leaky, weed forest.
it will be fine
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
It Will Be Fine, is engaging in the language of visual representation through the combined mediums of painting, photography and artificial intelligence (Ai) together with images held in the Special Collection picture archive in Bergen. To reflect on the ways in which meaning and memory is constructed and conveyed through visual forms and knowledge systems.
