Hanni Kamaly

📍 Venue → GHMP

Hanni Kamaly is a research-based visual artist who works with sculpture, film, and performance. She reads material culture in terms of racial and colonial history and lineages of power exerted through systems of oppression as well as subject-object relations anchored in an understanding of the human body as the site where subjectivity is produced. The artist often brings fragility to a critique of assumed structural power relations and complements histories of brutality and suffering with poetic connections. The series of metal sculptures is both solid and delicate in their materiality and stance—abstract, yet each embodying a concrete person who has been subjected to various forms of racist and xenophobic violence, whether by individuals or institutions. Devoid of direct pictorial representation, in calling forth their stories, the slender but sturdy sculptural figures stand in as a marker for those who were denied dignity, agency, freedom, or a voice. With her deep interest in the politics of memory and commemoration in terms of monuments in the public space, often representing figures of power such as rulers or leaders, the artist proposes alternative monuments commemorating those whose names and histories are more often forgotten than remembered.

Hanni Kamaly (*1988) is a visual artist based in Stockholm. Kamaly received an MFA from the Malmö Academy of Art and has also studied at the Bergen Academy of Arts and the International Art Academy of Palestine. Kamaly’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and spaces including KINDL, Berlin (2022), Göteborgs konsthall, Gothenburg (2021–2022), Mint, Stockholm (2021), Index, Stockholm (2021), Oslo kunstforening (2021–2021), Moderna museet in Stockholm (2018–2019) and Malmö (2020), coyote, Stockholm (2020), Interkulturelt Museum, Oslo (2019–2020), Lunds Konsthall (2019), Ginerva Gambino, Cologne (2019), Tegel, Stockholm (2019), Malmö Art Museum (2017–2018), Skånes konstförening, Malmö (2017), Almanac, London (2017), and Rupert, Vilnius (2016). Kamaly also participated in the Luleå Biennial (2018–2019) and the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021) and is one of the artists invited to the Sharjah Biennial in the UAE in 2023.