Stitching Absence
Mixed-media work on paper | 2025
Stitching Absence is a wall-based photographic work composed of photographs from expired and blank identification cards, assembled and stitched with thread. Thread functions as both connective tissue and visible trace, marking attempts to hold together identities that have been invalidated, suspended, or left unrecorded. Blank cards punctuate the repeated images, registering moments of absence, refusal, and administrative delay, situating waiting as a condition embedded in documentation itself.
Stitching Absence was presented as part of the solo exhibition Waiting Tides.
Stitching Absence (2025)
Mixed-media work on paper (photographic prints, thread)
138 cm x 244 cm
Exhibition text
Waiting Tides is a solo exhibition by Jonelle Twum. The exhibition unfolds as site-specific installations across three floors, tracing gestures of water, language, and memory. At its core is the sea — the Atlantic — not as backdrop, but as restless witness, elemental carrier,and unmarked grave. It is a living archive, holding the afterlives of slavery, migration, and the generational condition of waiting in its shifting tides and sedimented histories.
The exhibition draws from the resonances of the Black Atlantic, where memory is fluid, submerged, and constantly in motion.The sea is not silent. It remembers. It breathes, holding those lost during the Middle Passage in molecular, mythical, and ancestral form — present in salt, in coral, in current. Its tidal pull shapes the contours of the exhibition, folding in personal and political histories.
Threaded through these installations is the artist’s mother’s migration to Sweden — a crossing shaped by deferred futures,withheld recognition,and the slow violences of bureaucracy. Her voice becomes a vessel, a tide of its own, where personal experience merges with broader currents of displacement, refusal, and survival. Each floor evokes a distinct yet interconnected note. On the ground floor, a speculative soundscape rises from the seabed. A shimmering black carpet turns the space into a submerged world, where molecule and myth coexist. Language drifts — abstracted,fragmentary, echoing as if underwater. The first floor stages a waiting room — familiar, measured, and unsettling. A cassette tape sent to the artist’s mother plays in Twi — partially translated, partially withheld — its omissions as protection. The second floor turns inward. A video work weaves archival footage of the artist’s mother in anticipation of her migration to Europe. Here, language appears in absence, and silence becomes its own form of speech. On the same floor, a patchwork of ID photos — expired, altered, blank — form terrain of bureaucratic remains, an archive of the self, suspended in systems of recognition.
Rather than offering resolution, Waiting Tides gathers atmospheres and relations. It listens to voices that echo without declaring themselves. It considers how language can become protection,how absence might be a form of presence, how waiting, like the sea, holds its own quiet knowledge. It is in the space between the drowned and the living, between memory and speculation, between the inhale and the exhale, that Waiting Tides takes shape — shifting with every return.
Credits
Technician: Jesper Veileby
Production assistant (Stitching Absence): Michelle Demåne
Exhibition text (Suspended time — Black Liquid Breath): Marie-Louise Richards
Curatorial support: Tawanda Appiah
Installation assistant: Tere Falomir
Graphic design: Linda Hallstan
Documentation: Loc Vo
Krognoshuset team:
Supervisor/Curator: Jin Hwa Borstam
Exhibition Guide: Julia Andersson