PROCESS: Cleanse
PROCESS is an exhibition concept created in collaboration with Marie Cole, Haweya Jama, Ayesha Jordan, and Fotogalleriet’s curatorial fellow Lara Okafor.
Inspired by the cycles of agricultures – Cleanse, Cultivate, and Harvest – Process will unfold over time through artistic interventions, gatherings, and performances.
Artists Ayan Abdi, Javon Bennett, and Walden Walker will use the gallery as an open studio, allowing their practises to evolve in dialogue with the public. The exhibition explores the gallery as an experimental space for creative participation, critical thinking, communal growth, and exchange – centred around Afrodiasporic perspectives.
In PROCESS’ first season, Cleanse, we will be exploring the question: What can we release? Calling back to natural cycles, the same way we weed the ground in preparation for planting, we want to shed those things which may be inhibiting our growth and make way for what is to come. Participate in the public programme and visit our open studio artists between Thursday-Sunday during the gallery’s opening hours.
Music, exchanges, and introductions. All are welcomed to Fotogalleriet from 18:00 to experience the first day of the PROCESS experimental container being open to the public.
18:00 – Doors open
18:30 – Welcome and introduction
19:00 – Activities, refreshments and DJ
21:00 – Closing
Family in Focus is an evolving photographic archive that explores African and diasporic family identity through the intimate act of portraiture. Using analog photography, this project documents and bridges familial connections across geographical and cultural landscapes, capturing families in Norway, Brazil, Egypt, and Kenya. Through these images, Ayan Abdi aims to reveal how family bonds are visually represented, preserved, and passed down over time.
On Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 March, 2025, the residency will function as a pop-up studio, inviting families and individuals to participate in portrait sessions while also contributing their own family photographs. By bridging the tradition of African photography studios with diaspora archives, the project examines how space shapes identity, memory, and belonging. This interactive approach transforms the gallery into a communal space—an ever-growing archive of family stories that reflects both personal and collective memory.
While the project highlights connections within the African diaspora, it also actively welcomes participation from local and global communities. Through portrait sessions, image collection, and digital contributions, Fotogalleriet becomes a living, evolving space where photography is not only exhibited but created in real time.
What would happen if my body became soil?
Over the past 24 months, Marie Cole developed a practice rooted in intuition, body work, movement, and repetition. Working across diverse media—video, textiles, prints, sculptures, and gatherings—she has pursued performative rituals. Her ongoing investigation, titled Soil Ground, is an evolving organism of poetic ideas, archival material, and personal memories. These elements come alive through ritual performances, video, readings, and textile prints that examine the relationship between body and soil.
In this performance, Marie Cole, invites Gloria Kapako, and Marea Vigesaa to explore the soil. As they strive to return to earth, Cole has defined the body through three interconnected movements: Transformation, Transplantation, and Transmission. The prefix “trans-” signifies crossing, moving through, or beyond, framing her understanding of our connection with soil.
Guided by an intuitive score shifting between building and digging, the ritual interrogates my Black, queer, diasporic body alongside an imagined Soil Body—both familiar and unfamiliar. More than a performance, Soil Ground is a ritual, an invitation to return to the land, to presence, and to the kneading between past, present, and future.
NB.
18:00-18:30 Doors open
18:30-20:00 Performance (doors will be closed 18:30)