SANTIAGO MOSTYN - NATURAL HISTORY : Paris
Andréhn-Schiptjenko is pleased to present Natural History, a solo exhibition by Stockholm-based artist Santiago Mostyn (b. 1981). Rooted in an extended period of visual and auditory research into the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983), the exhibition draws on photographic archives, personal correspondence, audio recordings, textile craft, and 16mm film to reckon with an open-ended retelling of one of the most consequential, and overlooked, episodes of the Black Power era.
On 13 March 1979, the New Jewel Movement carried out a bloodless coup on the island of Grenada. Under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the People's Revolutionary Government set about transforming the small, majority Black nation of 100,000 people into a radically egalitarian social democracy. In October 1983, internal divisions led to Bishop's execution at Fort Rupert alongside central committee members including Jackie Creft, the influential Minister of Education. Days later, the United States invaded Grenada, and the bodies of the leaders were never found. For Mostyn, who lived through the invasion as a child, the defeat left, “a wound in the conscience of the hemisphere that is yet to heal."
Psychologists describe trauma not as a shocking visual memory but as a void—an event so fragmented and unassimilated that memory fails and autobiographical continuity falls apart. Natural History builds a pathway back to, and around, that absence. Mostyn approaches the void obliquely, inhabiting the craft techniques of his parents: his mother's textiles and his father's work in music and radio.
Central to the exhibition is a 16mm film portrait of Bernard Coard—Deputy Prime Minister of the Revolutionary Government, often blamed for the split that resulted in Bishop’s death. After twenty-six years in prison, Coard now lives alone in Jamaica, where he is filmed moving through his daily routines of writing, swimming, and reading, before falling asleep and waking, in an altered state, in the middle of the jungle. Coard is a figure of profound historical ambivalence: the intellectual architect of the PRG, a childhood friend of Bishop, and since his release a writer, lecturer, and consultant on projects including Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series.
An eight-channel sound composition is imagined as an attempt to tune in—across more than four decades —to the broadcasts of Radio Free Grenada, the national radio station of the PRG and a vital conduit for both music and politics during the Revolution. The composition draws on original tape recordings of music, poetry and street interviews, playing through coeval hi-fi speakers from Sweden—a country that once maintained a distinctive solidarity with postcolonial liberation movements, while staying away from the front lines.
Hand-dyed and printed fabric panels pay tribute to the craft practice of Verena Mostyn, and to the visual iconography of the Revolution itself—with Maurice and Jackie prominent in a pattern that channels the graphic traditions of The Black Scholar and the New Jewel, prominent news sources of the time.
Painted collages draw on personal archives and images sourced from the US Library of Congress, produced by the very military that ended the world these images celebrate. The presence of Creft, executed and disappeared, insists on her place in a history that has too often marginalised her.
Natural History constitutes a reckoning with personal history, with the knowledge carried in craft, and with the kind of memory that resists being metabolised into official narrative.
Santiago Mostyn works with film, installations, and performances to reflect on cultural exchange and interconnectedness among African diasporic communities across continents. Through layering and collage, whether in video or installation, he works fluidly with imagery ranging from the artist’s own personal archive to footage of historical events, political and cultural figures, and racial injustice. His work may be viewed as an ongoing visual research framework which reconsider how broad histories and personal memory might intersect.
He received his BA from Yale University and, after attending Städelschule from 2006-2007, his MFA from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Skånes Konstförening (2025), Mariakirken, Copenhagen (2023), and Gerðarsafn, Kópavogur (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Stellenbosch Triennale, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, the Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (all 2025). He was a resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2022, and held the 2024–25 David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
In collaboration with Susanna Marcus Jablonski, Mostyn is currently realising Master Narratives, Malmö's official anti-racist monument, to be permanently installed in Jesusparken in 2026. Natural History (Lessons) will be shown at Primary Nottingham in the fall of 2026.
His work can be found in numerous collections such as the Buffalo AKG Museum, New York, Hasselblad Foundation, Göteborg, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Public Art Agency, Sweden and CNAP, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France.
