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Tuesday 10am - 5pm Wednesday 10am - 5pm Thursday 10am - 5pm Friday 10am - 5:15pm

Iniva - Institute of International Visual Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London (2026)

30/05/2026

During the 61st Venice Biennale Opening Week, we were meant to host an invitation-only gathering for iniva's Post-National Digital Pavilion, in partnership with the British Council. We cancelled the event in support of artists in solidarity with the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) strike and assembly.

Instead, we've recorded the conversation on nationhood and diasporic strategies for making belonging which will be available online soon.

The Message Is in the Pattern: Making Kin – Artists' Long Table brought together Carolina Caycedo and Thania Petersen in dialogue with Rose Afefé, Rajyashri Goody, and Anya Paintsil, with moderation by Sepake Angiama . The artists spoke about the larger questions of representation, and the more intimate and material ways of making belonging, from land and architecture to food, and everyday practices.

The conversation unfolded naturally between the artists, with facilitation from the iniva team, creating an intimate circle where discussions moved among perspectives, practices, and lived experiences. The focus shifts between large questions of representation and more personal, material ways of making belonging, from land and architecture to food, and everyday practices.

This edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion: The Message Is in the Pattern invited artists Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil) to create new digital work that explores community engagement, cultural translation, and artistic and social practices. You can now view the artworks on iniva's website (link in bio🔗)

The Message Is in the Pattern will also commission four writers through an international open call to respond to these works in a new publication. ✏️

The Message Is in the Pattern is supported by the British Council

Curated by Beatriz Lobo with programme support by Vasita (Pleng) Jirathiyut.

23/05/2026

Julian Henriques dropped by the Stuart Hall Library just to see Linett Kamala's show 'Dancehall Riddim Queens'! 😍

He also wrote and directed the 1998 British musical comedy drama 'Babymother'. The 2021 Blu-Ray copy of the film is also showcased in the exhibition, as part of Linett's archive. Rumour has it that Linett Kamala had worked on it as a researcher!

Bringing together paintings and archival material, the exhibition explores the cultural, sonic and visual histories of dancehall, centring the legacies of women whose contributions have shaped the culture while often remaining under-recognised or erased.

🔊Dancehall Riddim Queens🔊
Solo Exhibition by Linett Kamala
📍Stuart Hall Library
🗓️ until 31 July 2026
🕰️ Tuesdays to Fridays 10am to 5pm

Find out more about this show by visiting iniva’s website, link in bio! 🔗

Dancehall Riddim Queens is supported by

Dancehall Riddim Queens is curated by with programme assistance by .

20/05/2026

It's a throwback to when we met Andy Koh and Sharon Lim from the Library & Archives department at the National Gallery Singapore ☀️

On a visit to London, they dropped by the Stuart Hall Library to learn more about our organisation and our library and archive practices. They also generously donated two books which are now in the Stuart Hall Library: Tang Da Wu: Earth Work 1979 and See Me, See You: Early Video Installation of Southeast Asia. 💛📚

17/05/2026

We are thrilled to introduce How to Create a Tradition – Chapter 1: the party is everywhere by Rose Afefé (2026) 💜

In How to Create a Tradition, Rose Afefé unfolds a speculative approach to tradition-building grounded in Terra Afefé, her adobe micro-city in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Terra Afefé operates as a living structure shaped through communal labour and shared-making, sustained by proximity to the land, and continuously redefined through use. Art does not sit apart from life but emerges through it, embedded in the rhythms and material conditions of everyday practice. Drawing of the logic of Sankofa, Afefé proposes the beginning of a new ritual through mask-making workshops with local children.

You can view the work on our website alongside the works by Rajyashri Goody and Anya Paintsil, and the curatorial writing by Beatriz Lobo. 💜

https://iniva.org/how-to-create-a-tradition/

How to Create a Tradition – Chapter 1: the party is everywhere (2026) is commissioned for iniva’s digital programme The Message Is in the Pattern, our 3rd edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion. It is a digital programme in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale, developed in dialogue with Lubaina Himid’s British Pavilion commission, ‘Predicting History: Testing Translation’.

This edition invited artists Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil) to create new digital work that explores community engagement, cultural translation, and artistic and social practices.

The Message Is in the Pattern will also commission four writers through an international open call to respond to these works in a new publication. ✏️

The Message Is in the Pattern is supported by the British Council.

Curated by Beatriz Lobo with programme support by Vasita (Pleng) Jirathiyut.

Graphic design by Jeffrey Choy with art direction by Charlotte Mui.

15/05/2026

You can't leaf through short films the way you can with a book. But our archive volunteer Maddie Black has been doing something close to it. 📼 In the last few months, Maddie has been helping us gain a better sense of what's in the archive by watching every DVD, CD and VHS in iniva's Moving Image Collection.

In her blog post, she reflects on what she found: films that show what systemic power actually looks like. The writing highlights Chen Chien Jieh's documentary 'Empire's Borders 1' on US-Taiwan border discrimination, the film 'A Common History' which explores the immigrant experience in Leicester, covering the 1974 Imperial Typewriters Strike, and a film by Hila Peg who presents a mock trial asking whether art itself has been corrupted.

Read A Leaf of Moving Image at https://iniva.org/a-leaf-of-moving-image-by-maddie-black/

15/05/2026

It is our great pleasure to share Unhatanhat no more, no longer Upash*tapashi उन्हातान्हात नो मॉर, नो लॉगर उपाशीतापाशी by Rajyashri Goody (2026) 💛

The work unfolds as a sustained attention to how caste operates not only as a social structure, but as something that settles into the body through the most basic conditions of survival: food, water, rest, and access to space. Developed through workshops with 28 girls at the Bahujan Hitay hostel in Pune, the work moves between lived testimony and collective narration, tracing the passage from rural precarity into education as both emancipating and contested. The final digital work, with voices reading in both Marathi and English, allows these narratives to intersect across time, complicating linear ideas of progress.

You can view the work on our website alongside the works by Rose Afefé and Anya Paintsil, and the curatorial writing by Beatriz Lobo. 💛

https://iniva.org/unhatanhat-no-more-no-longer-upash*tapashi-rajyashri-goody/

Unhatanhat no more, no longer Upash*tapashi उन्हातान्हात नो मॉर, नो लॉगर उपाशीतापाशी (2026) is commissioned for iniva’s digital programme The Message Is in the Pattern, our 3rd edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion. It is a digital programme in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale, developed in dialogue with Lubaina Himid’s British Pavilion commission, ‘Predicting History: Testing Translation’.

This edition invited artists Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil) to create new digital work that explores community engagement, cultural translation, and artistic and social practices.

The Message Is in the Pattern will also commission four writers through an international open call to respond to these works in a new publication. ✏️

The Message Is in the Pattern is supported by the British Council.

Curated by Beatriz Lobo with programme support by Vasita (Pleng) Jirathiyut.

Graphic design by Jeffrey Choy with art direction by Charlotte Mui.

13/05/2026

Dr. Katherine McKittrick dropped by the Stuart Hall Library 🖤

We're proud to hold her book Trick Not Telos in our collection, which is a limited-edition handmade box set containing five essays by McKittrick, published in both English and French, each housed in its own separate booklet.

Trick Not Telos is in part working through and complementing Amiri Baraka's "the changing same" by illuminating how creative unboundedness is harnessed to black energy, memory and place. As method, the changing same is the engagement, sharing, reading and response to black ideas (songs, narratives, spirituals, tunes, words, lyrics, impulses, sounds) with a recognition of contested and broken and seamless creative genealogies. In this, black creative uneasiness; it emerges from both trace and impossibility.

Come and visit us to explore this very special book and more. 📚

The Stuart Hall Library is open Tuesdays to Fridays, 10am to 5pm.

13/05/2026

We are so proud to present Spun Yarn by Anya Paintsil (2026).🧡

The work begins from a question of how connection is sustained in places where formal infrastructures of care are thinly distributed, and where community life is held together instead through informal, word-of-mouth exchange. Paintsil shifts her practice into the town centres of Wrexham and Glyn Ceiriog in North East Wales, approaching Black residents directly, inviting them into the tactile act of braiding hair, and allow the conversation to naturally unfold. These exchanges about migration, isolation, care and the search for spaces where their hair – and by extension their identities – can be held without refusal.

You can view the work in full on our website alongside the works by Rajyashri Goody and Rose Afefé, and the curatorial writing by Beatriz Lobo.🧡

https://iniva.org/spun-yarn-anya-paintsil/

Spun Yarn (2026) is commissioned for iniva’s digital programme The Message Is in the Pattern, our 3rd edition of the Post-National Digital Pavilion. It is a digital programme in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale, developed in dialogue with Lubaina Himid’s British Pavilion commission, ‘Predicting History: Testing Translation’.

This edition invited artists Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil) to create new digital work that explores community engagement, cultural translation, and artistic and social practices.

The Message Is in the Pattern will also commission four writers through an international open call to respond to these works in a new publication. ✏️

The Message Is in the Pattern is supported by the British Council.

Curated by Beatriz Lobo with programme support by Vasita (Pleng) Jirathiyut.

Graphic design by Jeffrey Choy with art direction by Charlotte Mui.

12/05/2026

Three new postcards from Linett Kamala's Dancehall Riddim Queens, £1.50 each, are now available at Stuart Hall Library! It's a small piece of the exhibition to send, to keep, to pass on.

🔊Dancehall Riddim Queens🔊
Solo Exhibition by Linett Kamala
📍Stuart Hall Library
🗓️ until 31 July 2026
🕰️ Tuesdays to Fridays 10am to 5pm

Bringing together paintings and archival material, the exhibition explores the cultural, sonic and visual histories of dancehall, centring the legacies of women whose contributions have shaped the culture while often remaining under-recognised or erased.

Find out more about this show by visiting iniva's website: https://iniva.org/programme/projects/dancehall-riddim-queens/

Dancehall Riddim Queens is supported by

Dancehall Riddim Queens is curated by with programme assistance by .

07/05/2026

Our team and artists are in Venice for the 61st Venice Biennale! ❤️

Here are the artists photographed alongside the sections of Lubaina Himid's British Pavilion commission Predicting History: Testing Translation that inspired the curatorial thinking behind each artist's place in our Post-National Digital Pavilion: The Message Is in the Pattern.

💗Rajyashri Goody with the Chefs
💜Rose Afefé with the Architects
💛 Anya Paintsil with the Tailors

Developed in dialogue with the commission, this edition invites artists Anya Paintsil (UK), Rajyashri Goody (India), and Rose Afefé (Brazil) to create new digital work that explores community engagement, cultural translation, and artistic and social practices.

The Message Is in the Pattern will also commission four writers through an international open call to respond to these works in a new publication. ✏️

Stay tuned to see the new digital commissions and for the open call! 😍👀

The Message Is in the Pattern is supported by the British Council

Curated by Beatriz Lobo with programme support by Vasita (Pleng) Jirathiyut.

For more information check out: https://iniva.org/programme/projects/the-message-is-in-the-pattern/

Iniva - Institute of International Visual Arts

30/05/2026

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Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 5pm
Friday	10am - 5:15pm