Artist presentation: Natifah White (AiR)

Artist presentation: Natifah White (AiR)Wednesday 3 June 2026, 7- 9 pmBlack Archives Sweden, Falkenbergsgatan 4A, MalmöDoors open: 7 pmEvent starts: 7.30 pm Join us for an artist presentation with UK-based dance artist and researcher Natifah White, concluding her residency at Black Archives Sweden during April–May 2026.During the evening, Natifah will share aspects of her artistic practice, ongoing research, and the minor unravelings encountered throughout the residency process.Working in dialogue with Black Archives Sweden’s reference library and this year’s theme, Black Sonority, Natifah has explored how Black sonority might be read through the body. Drawing from her dance librarianship practice, she investigates expanded notions of reading, listening, and materiality, asking how movement, attention, and collective engagement can offer new ways into the archive.Using dance scores and dramaturgical tools, the residency has functioned as an experimental space for thinking through archives beyond the written word, inviting embodied and relational encounters with knowledge, memory, and sound.🔸 About Natifah WhiteNatifah White is a dance artist from Nottingham, UK, currently applying movement principles to reimagine archive and library systems. Her work spans performance, research, and collective practice, with collaborations including Seke Chimutengwende, Florence Peake, SERAFINE 1369, and Elinor Lewis/Joe Garbett.A central question in her current practice is:“How do we take the immaterial into the material?” (ref. Joseph Zeal-Henry)Through this enquiry, Natifah explores how archives and libraries can be experienced through movement, relation, and collective care. Her practice is grounded in learning with others, building on existing practices, and creating ways for knowledge to circulate across bodies and communities. These investigations also extend into her digi-practice, thisishappening, which approaches archiving as an “amplifying practice” using crediting, repetition, and sharing as strategies of solidarity.🔸 About the ResidencyBlack Archives Sweden’s residency program is an opening gesture toward imagining the archive as a living laboratory: experimental, alive, and shaped by the people who move through it. At the center of the residency is the growing reference library, envisioned not as a fixed collection but as a living ecosystem. The residency invites artists and cultural practitioners to contribute methods, materials, and practices that expand what the archive can become. Grounded in Black critical thought, the program prioritizes dialogue, research, process, rest, and collective imagination over the production of finished works.***Photo: Mariana MachadoThe residency is supported by Malmö Stad, Region Skåne, and the Swedish Arts Council.