They were, those people, a kind of solution

From Near and Afar is a multimedia and discursive program that takes its starting point in the large-scale exhibition project Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden. Rather than focusing on history and memory in Tensta as a specific place, From Near and Afar dwells deeper into the subjective position of the guest worker, an experience shared by many residents in Tensta.

The first part of the series of conversations included Turkish artists Cana Bilir-Meier and Ahmet Ögut who thematized microhistory of migrations. Bilir-Meier’s work became a starting-point for conversations around guest workers in relation to storytelling as an ancient and traditional way of passing on complex, multi-dimensional information and ideas. Curators Fahyma Alnablsi and Emily Fahlén took part in the conversation.

The conversation was set in Tensta konsthall’s classroom, a discursive space created for the Silent university’s language café. The Silent University is a solidarty based knowledge exchange platform established by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. It is led by a group of lecturers, consultants and research fellows who took part in the migration course. The conversation was realized in collaboration with Södertörn University; Stockholm University; REMESO – Institute for Research on migration, Ethnicity and Society at Linköping University; Royal Institute of Art; Uppsala University and Malmö University.

Society of Friends of Halit consists of artists and activists who have been investigating the murder of Halit Yozgat, a young Muslim man killed in Kassel in 2006.

He was the ninth victim in a series of racially motivated murders of immigrants conducted by the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU, or National Socialist Underground) in Germany.

Society of Friends of Halit is an alliance with those whose work is devoted to antiracist and antifascist research and activism, work which has been ongoing for decades and continues today. Natascha Sadr Haghighian, active in the Gulf Labor Coalition, Ayse Gueleç and Fritz Weber of Society of Friends of Halit discussed the situated knowledge, migrant communities and racism.