Isatou Jallow’s textile installations investigate the contradictory nature of home, questioning its assumed association with safety and exploring the tension between protection and control. Made with indigo-dyed textiles produced by one of the last traditional Gambian dyers still practising today, the works are grounded in materials that carry their own cultural knowledge, here enriched with images drawn from the artist’s personal visual vocabulary.
what some call home (2026) becomes a space for exploring the duality between emotional vulnerability and the harsh realities experienced by Black women. The work originates from testimonies of femicide collected by the artist during her time in Jamaica and gives visible form to this violence through unsettling imagery. Rather than recounting a single traumatic story, the work reflects more broadly on the ways in which gender-based violence and racism intersect. In many contemporary societies, safety is not distributed equally: people of colour are subjected to disproportionate surveillance and control because they are perceived as potential threats, while the violence experienced by women of colour continues to be systematically minimised.
when seven (2026) can be read as a personal reflection on the artist’s earliest encounters with violence. As the title suggests, its imagery refers to memories from when she was seven years old. Three objects – an umbrella, a chair and a ring – recur throughout the work. Once associated with moments of conflict, over time they became involuntary triggers capable of transporting her instantly back to those memories. Alongside them, spectral animals populate the entire installation: ambiguous presences suspended between safe refuge and nightmare, once again recalling the tension between safety and control that runs through the artist’s practice. The work questions the deeper meaning of the word ‘home’: who has the right to feel safe within it, and who must instead learn to live with its latent violence?
Presented one above the other, the two installations enter into dialogue. Although they are based on distinct narratives centred on the violence experienced by Black women – one explored through personal memories, the other through collective stories – both works reveal how fear, protection and control are transmitted from one generation to the next, shaping the everyday spaces we inhabit.
Isatou Jallow (b. 2002, Basel) is a Black queer artist whose practice is rooted in the tensions and possibilities of intercultural identity. With connections to both Switzerland and The Gambia, she explores questions of belonging, visibility and cultural hybridity, making whitewashing and everyday racism central concerns of her research. Her paintings and installations are constructed from materials that carry ancestral knowledge, transforming exhibition spaces into landscapes of belonging and resistance. She recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts and will begin her master’s programme at the Städelschule in Frankfurt this autumn.
Text by Mirta Gianocca