Solmaz Collective
(2018 - ongoing)
Solmaz Collective comprises Zahra Bayati, Helen Eriksen and Gry O. Ulrichsen. They practice collectively to understand processes active within their colonised subjectivities that supports White supremacy. Solmaz Collective work in visual art, research and education. They are informed by post-colonial scholarship and their research is an enactment decolonising practices. They state "we formed as an act of resistence to experiences of aggressive exclusionary racism in the visual arts and education".
Collective Statement
Solmaz allows for an understanding of togetherness (Illeris). In all collective work it is hard to define how an idea or phenomenon develops to take on its own potential. It is most easily defined as a reflective process engaging in repeated artistic, theoretical and methodological discussion that optimises transparency and accountability for an inquiry.( c.f. Pardee et al 2017) An example of one concept emerging during collective work is “proximity of the Other” (Eriksen et al 2020 and Ulrichsen et al. 2021). This concept could not have come to light in our embodied practice without acknowledging that assumptions and thoughts in our individual learning processes needed to be porous so that they could be challenged in order to move out of stabile racialised positions. In this instance, who can truly claim ownership of a concept that emerged during a collective embodied spacial experience.
The, sometimes confusing, aspect of polyphony or difference emerges in these processes where different individual perspectives are brought into the conversation to develop a direction for it. This also means that collectivity and plurality also lead to zones of conflict or tensions that are useful spaces to discuss an overarching will to discuss what "this" collectivity is.
Zahra Bayati (PhD) from Gothenburg University is a senior lecturer in education science and advanced study programme for higher education art teachers, and gender studies. She has lectured extensively, contributing at Nordic universities and international conferences. Her thesis The Other in Teacher Education – A study of the racialized Swedish Student Conditions in the Epoch of Globalisation (2014) has been the focus of her most recent lectures, contextualizing it in discussions of anti-racism, feminism, socio-economic relations and environmental issues. She has been a guest speaker at Swedish networks of Somalian academics, Feminist Forum and Feminist Research Network as well student unions focusing on how to address challenges of change in questions and discourses of integration, recruitment and representation in educational systems, and the role of cultural expression in the (de)colonization of knowledge production.
Helen Eriksen (PhD) Art in Context, University of Agder. She activates New Materialist and post qualitative thought to examine the intra-relations in processes of decolonisation in artistic and teaching/learning practices. She studied at the National Academy of Fine Art, Oslo,(MFA) and as a researcher for art in public space at the Oslo School of Architecture. Eriksen is a co-founder and member of Tenthaus collective. As an artist/educator, she focuses on the emancipatory and utopian potentialities within participatory art. Eriksen also writes narrative texts as in her recent artist book Knock, Knock. She has presented with her own “signature” practice as well as collaborative practices with Tenthaus and Germain Ngoma in Europe and Scandinavia.
Gry O. Ulrichsen (PhD) NTNU and is associate professor at DMMH, Trondheim. She studied at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, (MFA). She explores productive entanglements between new materialisms and postcolonialisms and how they present through collaborative, participatory and socially engaged practices in the fields of art and education. She uses biographical accounts from her Norwegian/Kurdish family as a research methodology. Gry has published articles in journals such as InFormation and JASED and presented at Rethinking Nordic Colonialism in Nuuk, LARM festival in Stockholm, Fritt Forum in Gothenburg, Manifesta 4/Research room in Frankfurt, Lofoten Internasjonal Artfestival, Fotogalleriet and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, NRK ULYD and Svensk radio SRC.