Deeply Rooted: The Library Series
14 Mar – 27 Sept '26
'Deeply Rooted' is a public programme connected to the activation of OCA’s Library. Throughout 2026, OCA will host a series of events examining knowledge production, archiving and artistic research methodologies within contemporary art—linking artistic practices to sociopolitical questions that shape our global present.
The project includes archivists, researchers, cultural workers and artists who preserve and provide access to the myriad knowledge systems shaping our societies. Together with audiences, we explore how knowledge can be formed, shared and challenged.
Complimenting the public programme is the work carried out at OCA to renew its library and make it more accessible to the public. OCA’s library will become a research space where discourse, critical inquiry, artistic practices and the public converge. As part of this work, OCA will add to and expand its broad collection of exhibition catalogues, artists’ books, monographs, journals, as well as books on curatorial practice, critical theory, art history and philosophy.
The title of this public programme is drawn from the term the deeply rooted, coined by artist and curator Sundus Abdul Hadi. She defines the term as “…communities who are connected not just through struggle, but through deeply rooted ancient identities, familiar spirits, and shared experiences of resistance…” The intention of the event series is to confirm and map the cultural experiences and interpretative frameworks that bind deeply rooted communities together, while simultaneously investigating both the production and consumption of knowledge.
'Deeply Rooted' is curated by Piniel Demisse, as part of her one-year position at OCA, which is supported by Arts Council Norway.
Breaking Bread & Language
🗓️ March 14, 2026
📍 OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Nedre gate 7
Oslo, 0551
Space limited and registration essential
For the first event, we open the Library Series by examining how language shapes what we know and how we understand the world. Language can impose a coercive order, forcing us into existing structures and fixed meanings.
‘People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.’
– James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? (1979)
How does language create narratives, and how can it be a tool of sovereignty? In this event, we invite artists the collective Munnen, and Makda Embaie to explore language not as a fixed system, but as an adaptable site for worldmaking. What happens when we treat language as a material to be moved, translated, and shared, rather than a given structure to inhabit?
The event unfolds through two interconnected presentations:
Participatory presentation with Makda Embaie
This session invites participants into a shared exploration of language as a liberatory world-making practice, grounded in Makda Embaie’s artistic research and the work Breaking Bread and Language. Through collective reading, listening, and reflection, language is approached as lived, relational, and continuously remade beyond the frameworks of the nation-state. The session embraces non-linear ways of knowing, undoing hierarchical knowledge structures and opening space for alternative social imaginaries to emerge.
This session is intended for participants whose linguistic experiences are shaped by histories of migration, minoritisation, or coloniality, and who question dominant narratives of language, identity, and power.
Makda Embaie
poet and artist
Makda Embaie is a poet and artist who focuses on languages in relation to the nation-state and the individual. Through portrayals, activations, and practicing of her own specific experiences of language she has revealed linguistic components that have to do with space, time and the specific body, which complicates the nation-state's otherwise linear way of describing people and languages. Through installation, sound, text, film and photography, Makda shifts the focus from the nation-state's narrative towards specific experiences of language, in order to dive into the question of what language would be if this is where it arose from.
Recent works include the solo exhibition Frukten Mognar (2025) at Konsthallen Blå Stället in Gothenburg, featuring the book and practice “Breaking bread and language”, as well as a presentation within The Latvian Collection at the Latvian Museum of Art with the sound installation If joy was the door, what would be the room? (2022/2025). Public commissions include I remember all of you (2024), developed in collaboration with Black Archives Sweden, and the light-and-sound installation Gravel scatters time (2023) for the city of Gothenburg.
Participatory presentation with Munnen (Johnny Chang & Michael S. Bekele)
Collective sense-making/breaking through liberatory citation and sensation as an experience of multitudes. Co-organisers Michael S. Bekele and Johnny Chang introduce Munnen, the Bagarmossen-based mini culture house, sharing its growing community library and radio and how this connects to their practices. Johnny contemplates the gathering of language as an attempt to find one’s words, while Michael delves into embodied language as an exploration of the phenomenology of music—ending with a collective score generating new languages and worlds through symphonic cacophony.
Michael S. Bekele
writer, director, organiser and artist
Michael S. Bekele is a writer, director, organiser and artist who explores embodied language through performance, writing and film. Michael is entangled with the phenomenology of music and poetics while attempting to create collective experiences which are drawn from the hyper- and surreal.
Johnny Chang
interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher
Johnny Chang is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher. His artistic practice and research attend to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diasporic liminality, community memory, and social-movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation.
Munnen
miniature culture house and reading room for art, publishing, food, listening and collective making
Munnen (the mouth) is a miniature culture house and reading room for art, publishing, food, listening and collective making based on Byälvsvägen 18 in Bagarmossen, Stockholm, Sweden. Munnen’s initiators are artists and graphic designers who share a desire to center language and community with feminist, postcolonial, queer ethics as a foundation. They are interested in publishing, graphic design, visual arts, performance and writing/reading as different ways of engaging with the local area of Byälvsvägen. At Munnen they host a growing reading room which focuses on topics such as social organization, ecology, cooking, poetry, choreography, feminism, art, and radical pedagogy.
Upcoming programme
Film screening, Seeking Mavis Beacon: April 16
Olivia M. Ross and Haweya Jama
Deichman Bjørvika
On the Things We Forgot to Remember: April 17
Gwen Rakotovao, Olivia M. Ross, Kudzanai Chiurai, Miki Gebrelul & Piniel Demisse
Kunstnernes Hus
What Happens Between Art-Making & Critical Thought?: June 20
Dr. Myriam D. Diatta, C. Grace Chang, Apichaya (Piya) Wanthiang & Flexi Aukan
Kunstnernes Hus
Libraries & Counterpropaganda: September 26
Contemporary And (C&) book residency w/ Ethel-Ruth Tawe, Inemesit Richardson & Dr. Olin Moctezuma-Burns
Kunsthall Oslo
