Art talk: Santiago Mostyn

Photo: Senay Berhe

Mostyn’s work Citizen (on the big screen) is a four hour long documentation of an action in which the artist rowed a small boat across the Aegean Sea, from Dilek Peninsula in Turkey to Samos in Greece and back again. In the video work Delay (on the small screen in the north corridor) the artist moves like a dancer along the streets of Stockholm, concentrating his movement around Stureplan, the mecca of night life in the city. His tall figure sometimes pauses to blend in with young men.

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Santiago Mostyn was born in 1981 in San Francisco and grew up in multiple places, including Zimbabwe and Trinidad & Tobago, developing strong ties to both. He earned a BA from Yale University and later moved to Sweden, where he completed an MA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. He has been based in Stockholm for many years and maintains an international artistic practice.

“There is an obvious tear that occurs when someone has experienced being taken out of the place that they considered home. It was something that I felt was missing inside of me, that I needed to make sense of in order to figure out who I was – not that there is ever an answer to that question. When I first started thinking about making artworks, it felt like I was trying to fill that space with the images I was making or the projects I was doing.”
Santiago Mostyn to Eric Booker in Studio Magazine, Winter/Spring 2017

Santiago Mostyn’s films, installations, texts, and performances often explore the dissonance of lives lived between different political spheres. His work simultaneously employs footage of historical events, political and cultural figures, and racial injustice to speak to his own personal histories. His research-like process examines questions of identity and memory, both personal and collective, and the intersections of history with current events.

The films are part of the Filmprogram x2 curated by Anna-Karin Larsson and Andreas Bertman at Filmform in cooperation with Art Initiative and CMIR.

Still from Delay (2014) by Santiago Mostyn.