3,5 % Over Generations part 5
Marcia Harvey Isaksson och Kayo Mpoyi

Kayo Mpoyi

“I have been working a lot with the silence of history. I think it’s as if I’m performing a kind of archaeology, an excavation where my thoughts, dreams and feelings are echoes, remnants, reflections of those who came before me.”

Kayo Mpoyi’s work in the exhibition is a form of memory work through text, drawing and prints. Her work visualises the voices and stories hidden in family photo albums or in the objects silently found in state archives or museum collections. Mpoyi’s artistic methods reveal new layers of knowledge and understanding in a coded memory system. By exploring the potential for retakes and rewrites in graphic print, Mpoyi approaches objects and sculptures through the thinking of the hand, a way of bypassing colonial shadows and closed systems of knowledge.

About the artist

Kayo Mpoyi (b. 1986, in Zaire) is a Swedish artist and writer. Kayo received the Katapult Prize 2019 for the best debut novel “Mai means water”, a childhood story set in a Congolese exile environments in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Kayo Mpoyi studies fine art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Mpoyi has had public design commissions in Jordbro Centrum and a solo exhibition called “Inner Archaeology” at the Detroit Stockholm gallery in 2022. In the summer of 2022, Mpoyi made her debut as a children’s book author with the picture book Kitoko, and in the autumn of the same year a second adult novel, An Exercise in Revolution, was published.

Marcia Harvey Isaksson

“My artistry is about telling stories that connect the past with today’s existence. I want to understand what has happened in order to navigate the future. What happened to my ancestors and my home region back then has affected not only me but the whole world. Everything is connected.”

Marcia Harvey Isaksson pays tribute to her ancestors in the artwork Matriarchs, Myths + Legends which she is showing in the exhibition. Seven women whose fates span over six generations in her family, women who have had a crucial impact on her own life and artistic development. By exploring her own family’s stories, through weaving techniques and film, the audience is introduced to the fate of Charwe Nyakasikana Nehanda, a Zimbabwean heroine and spirit medium who played a key role in the first war of independence against the British in the late 19th century. Marcia Harvey Isaksson presents a new work that begins with her first name, Lindiwe, which means “the expected”. The work reflects on her own existence and the purpose of life. How can you feel important and significant even when you don’t fully understand your purpose?

Om About the artist

Marcia Harvey Isaksson (b. 1975 in Harare, Zimbabwe) is an artist, curator and exhibition designer based in Stockholm. In her own artistic practice, she uses textile methods to investigate place, belonging and heritage and often works with a mix of media, ranging from sculpture to performance to tell her stories.
She is the founder of Southnord, a platform aimed for promoting black and Afro-Nordic artists. She has previously run Fiberspace, an arena for textile art, craft and design, which she founded in 2015 and for which she was awarded the Dynamo grant 2022 by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the Cathrine von Hausswolf grant the same year. She also works as a freelance curator and combines it with design assignments from various museums in Sweden where she has designed everything from cultural history to socially oriented exhibitions.

Sponsored by