Somali-Swedish artist Salad Hilowle’s works on exhibit at American Swedish Institute

When artist Salad Hilowle and curator Sagal Farah came to Minneapolis last year in advance of Hilowle’s American Swedish Institute exhibition, they went everywhere Somali.

“We went to Somali restaurants, the Somali mall, the Somali Museum,” said Hilowle, who is based in Stockholm and grew up in Gävle, Sweden, where his was one of few Somali families.

Like Berlin-based Swedish Somali writer and curator Farah, Hilowle was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and went to Sweden as a child. Being in Minneapolis and seeing so much Somali culture felt special, something that didn’t happen very often in Sweden.

While there is no place like Minneapolis’ Karmel Mall in Sweden, there’s never been a Somali Swedish exhibition at the American Swedish Institute.

Hilowle’s exhibition “Inscriptions,” curated by Farah, and in collaboration with designer Oskar Laurin, offers Minnesotans a look into the Afro Swedish diaspora through video, photography, sculpture and textile works.

Hilowle and Sagal also worked with the Somali Museum of Minnesota, which hosts the video “Letters from Sweden,” about a mother in Somalia and her daughter in Sweden writing to each other, reflecting on diaspora and the meaning of home. The video is also on view at ASI’s Osher Gallery.

Hilowle collaborated with Minneapolis’ Soomaal House of Art to shoot his latest film, “Trummans Hymn,” about Sweden and St. Barts, a Caribbean island once under Swedish colonial rule, and the echoes of memory and resistance.

American Swedish Institute’s exhibitions manager Erin Stromgren heard about Hilowle’s work two years ago through a volunteer. Then she found him on Instagram.

“A lot of people were reaching out to him at the time, and he was like, ‘What the heck is this ASI? And who is this lady?’” Stromgren said, during the opening night event June 20 at ASI.

In the ballroom on the third floor of the museum, a circular wooden bleacher is positioned in front of the stage, where four television monitors hang. Together, they form one big, black screen.

“The reason it’s four TV monitors is it’s also because of the Swedish flag,” Hilowle said.

“A blacked-out version,” Farah added.

Hilowle’s 26-minute video, “Passion of Remembrance” — a meditation and reflection on growing up Black in 1990s Sweden — mixes TV clips and staged scenes, and speaks to immigrant communities in Sweden.

“We don’t have a public TV channel, we have an ‘open channel,’ where people from Eritrea, Iran, Turkey, other countries [can make their own programming] ...,” Hilowle said. “If you are an immigrant, you are also going to the open channel so you are able to understand what is going on in the home country.”

The video moves through imagery. Clips of Leila K., also known as Laila El Khalifi, who Hilowle said is like “the Swedish Nina Simone.” Shots of urban Sweden. A Somali woman dipping her hand into a river. Somali men praying. Somali artifacts.

In his video “Black Television,” two Black women use humor to deconstruct stereotypes in Swedish visual culture. We see the media interrogating Alice Bah Kuhnke, an Afro Swedish politician for the Green Party, clips of Afro Swedish sports stars, hip-hop stars and TikTok influencers.

“Partly ‘Black Television’ speaks to the healing power of comedic narratives in Somalia, how that permeates everything ― you cannot have a conversation without making fun of someone,” Farah said. “There is a long tradition of collective healing, of sitting together and experiencing the work together.”

One of Hilowle’s earliest works, “Home is where the heart is,” focuses on the sarong, a loose-fitting traditional garment worn by Somali men that wraps around the waist. The artist photographs himself wearing it, from home to the museum.

“The sarong is made of textile, so I was like, how about I print the photographs onto textile?” he said. “So it was kind of that, just playing around with it in its reality, go further and further and further.”

Taking things to the absolute limit is something Hilowle enjoys.

In the large-scale photograph “Black Portrait of Francis Bacon,” the artist sits shirtless in an orange armchair, wearing a sarong, green and yellow walls behind him. His face is blurred out ― a nod to Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon’s portraits of blurry faces. In the background of the photograph, there’s an 18th-century portrait of Adolf Ludvig Gustav Albert Couchi by Swedish rococo painter Gustaf Lundberg.

Couchi, also known as Badin, was a Swedish court servant and diarist who was born either in Africa or the Danish island St. Croix, and taken to Sweden. Throughout his life he was something of the royal family’s secret keeper.

His is one of the Black Swedish histories that Hilowle found through research and his desire to represent the Afro Swedish diaspora. In another video, “Vanus Labor,” Hilowle reads and reinterprets Couchi’s diaries.

“I was like OK, I want to talk to the European camera, I want to talk to the Swedish art history,” he said. “But I also want to talk about me being Somali.”

Where: American Swedish Institute, 2600 Park Av. S., Mpls.

When: Ends Oct. 26. Collaborative event on Aug. 3 with the Somali Museum of Minnesota.

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue., Wed., Fri.-Sun., 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thu.

Cost: $1-$15, free for kids under 5.

Info: asimn.org.