Fine Art Department Sandberg Institute: The Unreliable Narrator

A narrator does not simply recount events; they shape what becomes visible, what is withheld, and how meaning unfolds. Narration, however, is never neutral. The position from which one speaks is shaped by social, political, and historical forces.

For many migrants and members of diasporic communities, these forces have long influenced how their voices are interpreted — from administrative systems and border regimes to selective archiving, which has cast certain existences as less credible. Such structures preemptively determine what is considered credible or unreliable, often before any story is even told — revealing that this is not accidental, but enforced through the explicit design of erasure.

Making space

Bringing together works grounded in migratory experience and diasporic heritage, the program shifts the focus from the story itself to the conditions of its reception. These works reflect the pressures placed on certain narrators: navigating geographical, cultural, and bureaucratic borders; making space for their experience within systems that fragment or silence their accounts.

By acknowledging these gaps and interruptions as traces of lived realities, the works shine a light on how absence and silence speak to histories of displacement and exclusion.

Within this context, new modes of storytelling emerge, attentive to the forces that constrain them yet shaped by the knowledge and resilience of border-crossing perspectives. The Unreliable Narrator offers a space where such voices can resonate on their own terms, prompting us to rethink the boundaries of narrative, authority, and truth.

Contributing artists: Annabel Pérez Lubián, Yaima Carrazana, Kelvin Dijk and Anna Theunissen

When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

— Audre Lorde (a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”)