Failing Nearby:

A performance which questions (its own) (failing) language

In Swedish

Dare I speak to you in ways that seize you, bind you, fix you? Or do I choose to voice a language that speaks from that place of becoming? How might play and failure with things found at charity shops reveal the myth of authenticity?

Artists Munish Wadhia, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, and Johnny Chang collaborate on an exhibition which reflects on a close reading of Speaking Nearby (1992, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy N. Chen). This exhibition is a material dialogue with the residual and instability of ‘things’. Here, failing is seen as a location of being out of sync, out of place, but at the same time in tune with other rhythms. Failure is embraced as a condition of momentarily inhabiting uncertainty and unstable ground.

In Failing Nearby, the artists navigate a collaborative process with improvisation and playfulness, working with things found at a nearby charity shop. Through intuitive experimentation, they repurpose and reorient things found nearby to question and reveal workings of authenticity.

Munish Wadhia (b. 1972 Mombasa, Kenya) is an artist based in Mölnbo, he has a master’s in fine art painting from the Royal College of Art, London and a bachelor’s in fine art painting from Wimbledon School of Art (University of the Arts London). His work deals with painting through an experimental and interdisciplinary approach where his ideas are concerned with collective memories, inheritance, and the amnesiac absence of knowledges in westernised discourses.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian (IR/SWE b. 1995.) is an artist with a master’s degree in Fine Arts from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2022). He works with history’s unnoticed creators and puts history into use as a form of documentation and aspiration that calls for improbable and impossible futurities. His work examines how narratives and hierarchies disappear, return, and transform in the most unexpected ways. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is represented by Moderna Museet, the Public Art Agency Sweden, Botkyrka municipality, Uppsala Art Museum, and the Arab Image Foundation Library.

Johnny Chang is a Taiwanese-American multidisciplinary designer and artist based in Stockholm. Moving between visual communication, writing, and artistic research, his practice is concerned with circumstances of distance and diaspora, the politics of voice and listening, and processes of sense-making. Through visual culture, publication making, and collaborative and performative methods of reading, he investigates ways of listening and voicing toward cultivating resilient capacities for sensing, feeling, and being in the present. He studied at ArtCenter College of Design (BFA, US) and Konstfack (MFA, SE). Occasionally teaches at Konstfack and Stockholm University.

The three artists are invited by Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole

Candyland’s exhibition programme is based on voluntary work but is also supported by the City of Stockholm and the Swedish Arts Council.