Salad Hilowle: Vanus Labor
€27
Keywords: 2021, video installation, sculpture, identity, black gaze, Somali-Swedish artist
Size: 170 x 215 mmPages: 128
Format: hardcover
Edition: 700 copies
Language: English
Illustration: 52 colour, 23 b/w
Editor:Salad Hilowle, Oskar Laurin, Florence Wild
Text: Tina M. Campt, Sagal Farah, Ulrika Flink, Salad Hilowle, Oskar Laurin, Maria Lind, Håkan Nilsson, Isabella Nilsson, Sinziana Ravini, Fredrik Svensk
Book design: Oskar Laurin
Printing: Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja, Tallin
Publisher: Otsium Books
Pub Year: 2026
Weight: 459 gr
ISBN: 9789153176695
Description
Article no.: 9789153176695
The artwork centers around the life of a black slave boy who was taken from the West Indies to Sweden in the middle of the 18th century.
From the publisher:
Vanus Labor is a book that follows the artwork of the same name from 2021 to the present and serves as a document of the work’s trajectory, reception, and significance. The publication consists of republished texts from the original self-produced exhibition catalogue (2021), texts from different moments in the work’s development, transcribed conversations, as well as a number of newly commissioned contributions.
With texts by, among others, Maria Lind, Fredrik Svensk, Ulrika Flink, Mårten Snickare, Håkan Nilsson,Tina M. Campt, Sagal Farah, Sinziana Ravini, and Salad himself, the book aims to capture a pivotal moment in Swedish art history. Using Salad’s work as a lens, it illuminates the discussions that emerged around the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where questions of Black Swedish art history intersected with a broader and vibrant debate on the conditions, responsibilities, and purposes of art education and art institutions.
Salad Hilowle (1986), is a visual artist born in Mogadishu,Somalia, and raised in Gävle, Sweden. Hilowle works across film, photography, and installation to explore belonging, spectatorship, and the visibility of the African experience in Sweden. His art is an act of poetic recognition, which weaves together fragments of inscriptions, diaries, records, and everyday objects to construct narratives where the overlooked return with presence and agency.
From the publisher:
Vanus Labor is a book that follows the artwork of the same name from 2021 to the present and serves as a document of the work’s trajectory, reception, and significance. The publication consists of republished texts from the original self-produced exhibition catalogue (2021), texts from different moments in the work’s development, transcribed conversations, as well as a number of newly commissioned contributions.
With texts by, among others, Maria Lind, Fredrik Svensk, Ulrika Flink, Mårten Snickare, Håkan Nilsson,Tina M. Campt, Sagal Farah, Sinziana Ravini, and Salad himself, the book aims to capture a pivotal moment in Swedish art history. Using Salad’s work as a lens, it illuminates the discussions that emerged around the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where questions of Black Swedish art history intersected with a broader and vibrant debate on the conditions, responsibilities, and purposes of art education and art institutions.
Salad Hilowle (1986), is a visual artist born in Mogadishu,Somalia, and raised in Gävle, Sweden. Hilowle works across film, photography, and installation to explore belonging, spectatorship, and the visibility of the African experience in Sweden. His art is an act of poetic recognition, which weaves together fragments of inscriptions, diaries, records, and everyday objects to construct narratives where the overlooked return with presence and agency.