For the book’s first public launch in Norway, editor of the Reader and former director of OCA, Katya García-Antón will introduce the publication. Norwegian-Palestinian historian, Toufoul Abou-Hodeib will present her research for the Reader and her chapter titled The Travelling Scarf and Other Stories. Art Networks, Politics and Friendships Between Palestine and Norway. Mixe language rights activist and researcher, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, and Southern Sámi PhD fellow, Eva Maria Fjellheim, will discuss Indigenous language advocacy and their contributions to the Reader. Curator of Contemporary Art at MUNCH, and assistant editor of the Reader, Liv Brissach will talk about queer solidarity drawing on the work Probably Chelsea by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning presented as part of the ‘Actions of Art and Solidarity’ exhibition. Welcome words by OCA director, Ruben Steinum. To give collective closure to the programme, the Latin America Solidarity Organisation in Norway (LAG) will lead a Mística; a political ritual and performative practice intended to create unity and solidarity.

Art and Solidarity Reader — Radical Actions, Politics and Friendships (OCA / Valiz, 2022) features a collection of various accounts of artistic solidarity globally from the 1970s to today. The publication also acts as a companion to the OCA-curated exhibition ‘Actions of Art and Solidarity’ at Kunstnernes Hus (2021). The contributions by thinkers and artists from around the world emphasises the centrality of artist-led empathy and personal connectivity in building networks of solidarity and concrete actions that generate profound transformation in society.

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil is a Mixe linguist, writer, translator, language rights activist and researcher from Ayutla Mixe, Oaxaca, Mexico. Gil’s global influence has been growing since her publication of Nunca más un México sin Nosotros (Never Again a Mexico Without Us: Indigenous Nations and Autonomy), an essay in which she argued that ‘Mexico is not a single nation but a state in which many nations exist, oppressed’. Gil works as a legal translator and is a regular contributor to both El País and monthly magazine Este País. She also works as a project coordinator for Centro Académico y Cultural San Pablo in Ayutla Mixe, Mexico.

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib er Norsk-Palestinsk historiker og førsteamanuensis ved universitetet i Oslo. Hennes forskningsinteresser knytter seg til materiell kultur og ser på samfunns- og kulturhistorien til Levant, og hun har gitt ut boken A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017).

Eva Maria Fjellheim is a Southern Saami scholar/writer, indigenous rights defender, and radio documentary producer. She is currently a PhD fellow at the Centre for Sámi Studies at The Arctic University of Norway, UiT, where she is researching ‘green colonialism’ and the dilemmas that occur in the intersection of climate-change mitigation politics and Indigenous peoples’ rights in the context of renewable energy developments.

Liv Brissach is Curator of Contemporary art at MUNCH and part of the MUNCH Triennale curatorial team. Brissach previously worked at Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) as coordinator of OCA’s publications and as assistant curator for ‘The Sámi Pavilion’ exhibition at the Nordic Pavilion of the Biennale Arte 2022. As a writer, Brissach contributed texts for Munchmuseet on the Move, Kunstkritikk, Billedkunst, OCA and Fotogalleriet

Katya García-Antón is the former director/chief curator of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. She has curated over 100 exhibitions of art, design and architecture, and was most recently chief curator for ‘Actions of Art and Solidarity’ (2021). In OCA, García-Antón has generated significant Indigenising practices and programs, the most complex of which regards OCA’s role as commissioner of the transformation of the Nordic Pavilion into the Sámi Pavilion at the 59th International Venice Biennale. In August 2022 she became director of the Northern Norway Art Museum (NNKM).