Unmistakably You
14.03.—26.04.2026
Curated by Kathrine Wilson
Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art
With the photobook Mixed as its point of departure, Unmistakably You unfolds as a spatial exploration of language, belonging, and “mixed” as an artistic method. Through jacquard-woven textiles mounted on bamboo and large-format photographs, and through a queer lens, the exhibition opens up a landscape in which identity does not appear as a fixed category, but as something layered, shifting, and constantly negotiated.
At the centre of the project is the question: What happens when language cannot fully name lived experience? In Norwegian, there is no single word that fully translates “mixed” without reproducing ideas of race. Dhunsi takes this linguistic absence as a starting point, creating a space in which documentary and myth, archive and allegory, photography and textile are woven together. In this way, mixing becomes not only a theme, but a method — a way of approaching experiences that exceed stable categories and clear description.
This sense of displacement is also carried by the spatial structure of the exhibition. White surfaces, textile backs, and works suspended freely in space allow foreground and background to merge, subtly shifting the viewer’s sense of orientation. Perspective is gently destabilised, and the room emerges as more than a neutral frame: It becomes an active part of how the works operate and how they are experienced.
Photographs from the Institute of Racial Biology in Uppsala, Sweden, also form part of this structure. Hidden within the wall, yet insistently present, they appear as if breaking through the white surface. As historical traces and visual ruptures, they frame Dhunsi’s project and point to the ways in which classification, visibility, and violence are inscribed in the history of both images and institutions. The white cube does not appear neutral here, but saturated with the histories it carries.
Where Mixed opened a speculative space in book form, Unmistakably You allows the audience to physically enter it. The exhibition insists on identity as relational, ambiguous, and always in translation — not as something resolved, but as something continually taking new shape.
Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996) is a Norwegian-Indian artist who works at the intersection of photography, textile, and installation. Drawing on personal, diasporic, and colonial narratives, he examines how images, materials, and spaces shape experiences of belonging, displacement, and representation. Unmistakably You grows out of the book project Mixed, winner of the Nordic Photobook Award 2024. The book is published by Self Publish Be Happy / Mack Books on the occasion of the exhibition at Nitja. Dhunsi holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2024) and a BFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He recently showed Encircling Stories at the Centre for Photography, Stockholm (2024), following its initial presentation at MELK, Oslo (2023). His work has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb during Organ Vida 13th Festival and FUTURES Photography.