About the exhibition

Participating artists approach indexicality, image transmission processes and memory practices beyond the camera in various ways. This entails the activities of collecting, preserving, archiving, and reproducing personal and collective experiences and histories. Through different forms of abstraction, the artists explore collective myth-making, speculative archaeology, mourning processes, time, and energy fields. The artistic methods behind the works have been characterised by performativity, embodied knowledge and direct contact with the material.

The name Vera in the exhibition’s title does not refer to a specific person but to the word vera, which in Latin means true. It also links to artist Bitsy Knox’s work, which is based on the Christian saint Veronica, whose name means “true image”. Veronica is a combination of the Latin word “vera”, meaning “true”, and the Greek word “icon”, which translates to “image”. The title Vera Was Here alludes to the act of tagging or carving a name or the phrase “I was here” into a material as a memorial to someone’s presence in a place at a particular time, perhaps on a bus stop bench, at a landmark, or on a rune stone. The reference to this gesture is also an attempt to connect to the methods that recur in several works: making an imprint in a material through engraving, carving, rubbing, and colouring. 

The seemingly human desire to immortalise one’s existence and surroundings has been expressed in particular through the photographic medium, which has long served as a truth-teller and witness. Fifty years ago, in her seminal book On Photography (1970), Susan Sontag described the cultural role of photography as an addictive consumerism in the need to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced. Indexicality has long been the premise of photography; that is, the photograph’s dependence on the motif and the image as a promise that the subject in front of the lens has existed. However, this premise has become obsolete in our age of artificial intelligence and deepfakes.

The exhibition at Accelerator presents several forms of this unbroken link between representation and referent. The works have causal ties to something that has existed, has happened or is happening in the present. They are not confined to a temporality; even if the works are anchored in the past, they continue to be animated in space. The artists in the exhibition do not dwell on the original motif or its representation, but act in the gap of the indexical relationship. In the exploration of transfer processes and intermediary materials, there is a celebration of chance and the sensory breadth of the human body.

About the artists

Nora Al-Badri

Nora Al-Badri (b.1984) is a multidisciplinary and conceptual artist with a German-Iraqi background based in Berlin. Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces, that respond to the inherent power structures. 

In recent years, her work has been shown at Jeu De Paume Paris, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, KW Contemporary, Berlin, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, LIAF Biennale, Lofoten, SAVVY, Berlin, Art Lab École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Features on her work have been published in magazines such as The New York Times, BBC, The Times, Artnet, Wired, Le Monde Afrique, Financial Times, Arte TV, The Independent, Hyperallergic, Smithsonian magazine, Al Ahram, Egypt Today amongst others. She is a lecturer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich and regularly gives classes and lectures at universities and museums all over the world.

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole (b. 1988) works with lens and non-lens based photography presented in installations, performances and prints. At the core of her practice is an investigation into material processes that explore new forms within the framework of established techniques. These works explore the lived experience with the aim of distorting or completely shattering “the decisive moment”.

She was commissioned by the Museum of World Culture in 2021 as part of Afrika Pågår and Creative People & Places Hounslow, UK in 2022 for Wanderings. Agunbiade-Kolawole has exhibited widely in Sweden and internationally. Her works are represented in the collections of the Moderna Museet, Göteborg konstmuseet, and Brucebo Foundation in Sweden alongside National Health Services, Barking & Dagenham Council and Kingston University, UK.

Nicole Khadivi

Nicole Khadivi (b. 1998) is a Stockholm-based artist working with installations in which light, glass and movement interact to create spatial animations. She sees her works as optical machines without memory that build on the mechanisms of lens-based image making. Khadivi combines elements such as glass engraving and instantaneous light reflections to create representations of the relationship between time, perception, and memory, between permanence and transience, as well as the relationship between humans and machines. Her work primarily draws on personal memory fragments, but is also influenced by (popular) scientific findings in physics, astronomy, mathematics, and psychology.

She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2024 and has also studied at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main for a time. Her work has been exhibited at institutions both in Sweden and internationally, and her short films have screened at film festivals such as the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany and the Gothenburg Film Festival. In 2025, she will have her first institutional solo exhibition After Home at Uppsala Konstmuseum while participating in the group exhibition Vera Was Here at Accelerator in Stockholm.

Bitsy Knox

Bitsy Knox is a transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin working at the intersections of research, performance, radio, sound, sculpture, and writing. Her work focuses on the collapse of internal and external perception, exploring the interplay of private and social worlds touched by chaos, romance, and reclusion. Through in-depth research in Cognitive Science, Physics, Musicology, and Queer-Feminist Histories, she examines the role of personal and collective mythopoesis within socio-political structures, understanding myth as a cyclical, digestive process, in which narratives are continuously integrated and expelled to reflect desire.

In recent years, she has performed and exhibited work at Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität, Lüneburg; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.); Nida Art Colony, Neringa; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunstverein Bielefeld; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, and TENT, Rotterdam. Bitsy is Deputy Editor of Pina Magazine, and her writing has appeared in publications by e-flux, TABLOID Press, Pure Fyction, A Prior Magazine, and Sternberg Press, among others.

Dala Nasser

Dala Nasser (b. 1990) is an artist based in Lebanon and London. In her site-specific explorations, she treats materials as bearers of memory and testimony; witnesses to historical conditions, marked by the enduring forces of colonial systems and the ecological and psychological disintegration they cause. Her indexical paintings of land are made through direct contact on location, often by rubbings with organic materials, in places of religious, spiritual, historical or geopolitical significance. She treats her works as archives that register the traces of lived experience and environmental transformation, foregrounding non-claimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, and colonial theft.

Nasser has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (2025), Renaissance Society, Chicago, (2023), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2022) among others. Nasser’s work has been presented widely internationally including the Aichi Triennale 2025: Whitney Biennial 2024, the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); the 58th Carnegie International (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021); BetonSalon, Paris (2019); Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2019); and Sursock Museum, Beirut (2017).

Credits

Curator: Therese Kellner