All our hands combined
Exhibition, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art | 2025
As part of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art #13 (GIBCA 2025), Black Archives Sweden (BAS) presented All Our Hands Combined — a two-part exhibition that unfolded across Black Archives Sweden and The Gothenburg Museum of Art.
Rooted in the biennial’s theme, a hand that is all our hands combined, the exhibition gestured toward solidarity, collaboration, and the weaving of shared narratives. At its core lied a pressing question: What forms of resistance, of rest, of reimagining emerge in times of crisis? And what becomes of the archive when it is understood not as a static repository, but as a living, polyphonic space?
Invited artists Kiluanji Kia Henda, Tiago Mena Abrantes, and Pamela Z explored these urgencies through works that pulse with protest and possibility. Kia Henda and Abrantes presented Work Won’t Fix It, a political poster series that rejects racial capitalism’s idealisation of labour and its fractured subjectivities. Angola becomes their stage for refusal and reimagination. In counter-point, Pamela Z’s soundwork channeled the texture of Black breath — haunting and life-giving, posing a parallel to Work Won’t Fix It by asking: if labour cannot heal, what remains, and can breath itself become resistance, survival, and an opening toward relation, rest, and futurity? Together, these works convened a chorus of defiance and imagination, inviting audiences to pause, listen, and dwell in the possibility of otherwise futures.
Black Archives Sweden’s contribution to GIBCA 2025 could be experienced both at The Gothenburg Museum of Art and at Black Archives Sweden throughout the biennial period.
The exhibition at Black Archives Sweden and BAS’s contribution to GIBCA 2025 is curated by Jonelle Twum.
GIBCA 2025 is curated by Christina Lehnert.