Eric Magassa

Eric Magassa’s artistic practice encompasses collage, painting, photography and video, often combined in multifaceted, large-scale installations. His distinctively colorful compositions revolve around decolonial narratives and questions of identity, place and belonging. Magassa’s processing of various archives and making visible visual patterns in the often overlooked, explores ways of seeing and thinking, disturbing the canonized white cube and its narrow aesthetics.    

For Magassa, the residency In the Wake of the Waves is a deep dive into layers of stories, sounds and transcriptions that a place such as Grimeton can offer, and a way to investigate how communication is created and changed. Here he is interested in a soundscape that, like a radio frequency, captures impressions from the environment and that changes in interaction with nature, people, the weather and other ever shifting external factors. Magassa’s fascination with pirate radio is also one of the factors here, as a tool to break norms and give space to conflicting voices. The residency will be an opportunity to explore new media and perspectives, and to experiment with sound, light and moving material to create a dialogue between Grimeton’s history and Magassa’s own artistic expression. 

Magassa studied at Central Saint Martins in London, and the Art Students League of New York. He has exhibited widely, including at institutions like Malmö Konsthall (2023), Tensta Konsthall (2021–22) and Moderna Museet Stockholm (2018), as well as biennials like the Gwangju Biennale (2024), Borås Art Biennial (2024) and Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA [2019]). He lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.