"The Silent Distance" – Ula Ahmed, Masixole Ncevu and Roxana Rios

Drawing on their artistic work, Ula Ahmed, Masixole Ncevu, and Roxana Rios will engage in a multi-layered dialogue about forms of distance – geographical, identity-related, and interpersonal. The concept of “silent distance” understands the latter as a powerful metaphor for othering and the negotiation of identity – as an often unspoken, invisible social and emotional divide between a dominant “self” and a marginalised “other”. 

In their conversation, the artists will explore a state of “being close and yet never quite within”. They cast a sensitive gaze upon the silent spaces of the unspoken, the fragmentary, and the unsaid – spaces where experience slips away yet becomes all the more concentrated in its elusiveness. 

The trio understand spatial dimensions as sensory spaces of experience that elude physical unambiguity: they create closeness despite real distance whilst simultaneously allowing fractures and unbridgeable distances to emerge in the immediate presence of an opposite. 

Ula Ahmed is a self-taught photographer from Sudan and one of the first prominent female voices in the country's contemporary photography scene. She began photographing in 2016, and in 2021 her photographs were exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles, marking her international debut. She continues to shape Sudanese visual storytelling with subtle power. 
 
Masixole Ncevu is an artist whose work incorporates profound theoretical and conceptual research components. He integrates various media such as photography, film, drawings, performance, and sound into hiswork. He is inspired by the immaterial world, postcolonial theory, and various decolonial ideologies, and is interested in the sociological and psychological applications of photography. Ncevu uses photography as a tool to gain narrative insights, drawing on models from the social sciences such as ethnography and photo elicitation His work is characterised by a search for more historically contingent forms of understanding the present, particularly with regard to material culture. 

Roxana Rios’s practice engages in critical discussions concerning the development of (hegemonial) narratives, as well as the relations between image production and knowledge production. Through photographic, performative, and installative formats, they examine the body as a construct, material, and representative within social orders. In this function, the work can be viewed as an exercise in utopian thinking, seeing, and speaking – and a contribution to contemporary, social, and aesthetic discourses.