Michelle Eistrup presents a series of works from her ongoing project, Dikenga, at the Borås Art Biennial 2026. Crossroads and Mindful Movements – dem defy silence (2025/2026) is a series of fifteen flags that adorn Stora Brogatan, running through the city centre from the railway station up to the Borås Art Museum, where Eistrup is showing a video installation alongside new photographic collages.

Eistrup’s project draws on the heritage of Bakongo culture from Central Africa. Due to the transatlantic slave trade, it spread across the Americas, with symbols found in old cotton plantations and on altars. Today it endures in practices such as dance, music, oral traditions, and religion.

The flags form a “dictionary” of Bakongo gestures, some of which predate the Kingdom of Kongo (1400s–1800s). These movements embody specific cultural, spiritual, and emotional meanings. Performed and reinterpreted with members of Fisk University's African diaspora community in Nashville (US) and the diaspora in Portugal, the flags evoke diasporic knowledge systems and possibilities for resistance to oppression.

In the video installation Dikenga - Four Faces of the Sun (2024/2026) at the Art Museum, Eistrup brings the Bakongo gestures to life through dancers. The word Dikenga refers to a central symbol in Bakongo cosmology. Both the video and the flags are organised into the four sections of this symbol, which represent the parallel cycles of the sun and of human life: sunrise and spiritual awakening; noon and maturity; sunset and decline; death and midnight, regeneration, and spiritual reflection. The video features music by composer Anders Juhl.

Eistrup’s new photographic collages, I move between worlds, Niombo and Below within the earth, Wulfenite on quartz, focus on Central African artefacts and materials now residing in Western museums. These works intertwine the gesture and rich symbolism of the Bakongo Niombo figure from Stockholm’s Ethnographic Museum with a crystalline mineral, suggesting spiritual and material transformation and return to the earth.

Michelle Eistrup (born 1969 in Gentofte, grew up in France and Jamaica; lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) works collaboratively, guided by a belief in the transformative potential of collectivity. Eistrup’s transnational background – Danish, Jamaican, and American – often serves as a point of departure for works focused on identity, embodiment, faith, memory, and postcolonialism.