Nina Mangalanayagam / Blank Pages

Working across photography, film and sound installation, Nina Mangalanayagam explores questions of belonging and complex identities, often through an autobiographical approach. At Bildmuseet, she presents new works examining Sweden’s colonial past and its relevance today. 

In the exhibition Blank Pages, we encounter traces of the Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy from the perspective of a Black woman. Mangalanayagam draws on the figure of Ulrica, a woman found in the archives, to explore a position that remains difficult to access within Swedish history. Through archival fragments and absences, she brings together conflicting narratives, offering new perspectives on Sweden’s colonial history and its impact on contemporary society.

Nina Mangalanayagam (b. 1980) grew up in Sweden with a Danish–Sri Lankan heritage. She studied photography at the Royal College of Art and holds a practice-based doctorate from the University of Westminster. She is a senior lecturer at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, where she also conducts her artistic research. 

Artworks in the exhibition

Negativ, 2026 
[Negatives] 

5 photographs, pigment ink print on Dibond 

Mangalanayagam’s staged portraits of women with varying skin colours and appearances represent figures often absent from dominant imaginings of Sweden’s colonial history. Is our understanding of history affected by how we visualise the people it includes?

During the Swedish period on Saint Barthélemy, there were three different sets of laws for different groups of people: one for white people, one for ‘free Blacks’ and one for enslaved people. A ‘free Black’ person who could not prove their freedom risked being resold as a slave. Although whiteness as a category was important and highly prized in colonial society, people have often been categorised but not described in the archives. The category ‘free Blacks’ also included people with light skin.

Blond hair and blue eyes are often associated with notions of ethnic Swedishness. In visual culture, people with these features can mistakenly be assumed not to have mixed origins. In a society where whiteness occupies a dominant position, it is usually more advantageous to be light-skinned, to be perceived as white, and to have access to the benefits this brings. Choosing to pass for white can be viewed negatively, as a way of not standing up for those who cannot – or do not want to – pass. However, in a society such as Saint Barthélemy where people were treated very differently by the law, it is not difficult to understand that those who had the opportunity to pass for white chose to do so. To what extent does whiteness continue to shape Swedish society today? 

Ulrica, 2022–2026

2-channel video installation, stereo sound (15 min)

The video installation Ulrica looks for traces of a woman whose history is fragmentary and shaped by the racial categories and notions of belonging of her time, but also by our contemporary reading of that history. Using staged portraits, the work examines how our interpretation of Ulrica changes depending on how we imagine her.

Ulrica was born in Saint Barthélemy in the early 1790s to the ‘free Black’ woman Mary Audain. Her father was the Swedish colonel Robert Montgomery, who had been sent to the island by King Gustav III for treason. Ulrica’s history is not unique. Her story is one of many of children born to Swedish men on the island during the colonial period whose history has been forgotten, hidden and overlooked in Sweden’s historical narrative. In this work, the artist looks for traces of Ulrica in the archives and on the island today. As we approach the historical narrative, we can follow the narrator’s identification with a person whose history is based on the categorisations imposed on her by others.

Rather than trying to recreate an authentic Ulrica, the work asks what our assumptions about her say about ourselves, and how contemporary understandings about skin colour shape the stories we tell. The work also highlights the question of what counts as violent and what is considered violent. Is it the physical violence that breaks the law and leads to punishment, or is it the violence carried out in the name of the law – enslavement, flogging and the meticulous recording and categorisation of people?

With support from the Adlerbertska Foundation.

Prompt: Viktoriansk toile-tapet som avbildar ett fotografiskt porträtt av en svensk kvinna med blandad bakgrund, bosatt på Saint-Barthélemy 1794, 2023–2026 [Prompt: Victorian toile wallpaper depicting a photographic portrait of a Swedish woman of mixed background, living in Saint Barthélemy in 1794]  

Digitally printed wallpaper with AI-generated images
Pattern Design: Cecilia Pettersson

Toile de Jouy wallpapers from the 18th and 19th centuries often depicted stories and fantasies relating to botany, fruits and animals from Europe’s colonies. These patterns contributed towards a sense of wealth and luxury. This wallpaper was created by Mangalanayagam using AI (Midjourney) to explore how the image of the ‘free Black’ woman in Saint Barthélemy is constructed within contemporary historical narratives. More specifically, she investigates which images of the women on the island AI cannot generate because they are invisible in the sources.

Mangalanayagam has generated wallpapers in the Toile de Jouy style using text prompts, before selecting diffuse details from the background. This shift in focus enables other stories to emerge, similar to an enlargement of a negative where new technologies allow us to see background figures and blurry details. The wallpaper shows what is in the margins, invites new interpretations while also revealing gaps in the source material. Some stories are impossible for AI to visualise because they were never documented or were intentionally deleted.

Du håller deras andetag (Ceiba pentandra), 2026   
[You Hold their Breath (Ceiba Pentandra)]  

Collage on wallpaper

In Gustavia on Saint Barthélemy, a tree stands in a prominent spot by the harbour: a kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra). It is one of the first things travellers come across when arriving from the sea. Stories told on the island and a plaque at the foot of the tree condemning slavery suggest that it may have been used as a place of punishment, despite a lack of historical evidence. The tree’s location and the thorns covering its young trunks have contributed to the idea that it may have served as a warning to people arriving on the island.

The kapok tree appears in many mythologies and legends from West Africa, South America and the Caribbean. According to many traditions, the tree connects the spiritual world with the earthly world. It is also associated with forces that may be threatening or ominous, and in some traditions the tree should not be felled. Today, the kapok tree at Gustavia Harbour is a popular spot for eating lunch. It is also a popular location for wedding photographs – from certain angles, a branch forms the shape of a heart. Here, Mangalanayagam pieces together the kapok tree through a collage of photographs taken from different positions and angles. The tree is made present in the exhibition without being reduced to a single representation.

The botanist Beronda Montgomery has described the way old trees carry carbon from the breaths of previous generations through photosynthesis, and can thereby be understood as living witnesses to history. Mangalanayagam sees the tree as a witness to Saint Barthélemy’s violent history, but also as an involuntary actor in this violence: a bearer of memory in a landscape of forgetting.

Tomma ark, 2026
[Blank Pages]  

6 framed photographs, pigment print on Dibond

During the artist’s search for traces in the archives, it became clear that Ulrica’s own voice was often missing. Rather than focusing on the categorisations and circumstances in her life that have been preserved, Mangalanayagam has focused on the blank pages instead. Here, the reverse sides of her land title, documents about her ownership of enslaved people, as well as records of her violent actions and insults emerge as alternative narratives. The repeated recording of men’s names, citizenship and prosecution makes the women’s absence conspicuous.

By providing space for reflection and speculation, Mangalanayagam opens up new perspectives on our history and how it is written. Unlike the historian, she focuses on unwritten pages and the gaps in the archives. The blank pages are often pages that have not been scanned or lack metadata that makes them impossible to find in digital archives. Instead, they are recorded as ‘blank pages’.

In the exhibition space, Mangalanayagam has enlarged these blank pages to envelop us with what is missing, what was not written down and what has been lost. Her hope is that they will make room for speculation and critical fabulation (after Saidiya Hartman), allowing new stories to emerge. In which stories can we recognise what is missing, and what does that say about the documentation?

Tomma ark 2, (naturaliseringsark), 2026 
[Blank Pages 2 (Naturalisation Pages)]

12 framed photographs, pigment print

While searching for traces of Ulrica in the Swedish Saint Barthélemy collection in the French National Overseas Archives, Mangalanayagam found documents about people who became Swedish, known as naturalised Swedes. Few of these were women. They were usually men who sought to trade under the Swedish flag, or to do business in other ways. The photographs show the reverse sides of these certificates and are from a single stack of papers. One of these men is Richard Gräsberg, the husband of Ulrica Montgomery who is a central figure in Mangalanayagam’s research.

Det finns inget mer att tillägga / Det finns mycket mer att tillägga, 2026  
[There is Nothing More to Add / There is Much More to Add]

6 framed photographs, pigment print

When Mangalanayagam reviewed the legal rulings from Saint Barthélemy, she discovered that many of the pages had a marking at the end, or across an entire page, indicating that nothing further was to be added. Once again, she directs our attention to what was not intended to be read as information.

In the photographic tradition, the framing – the framed excerpt – is always a fragment of a larger story. What is inside the frame becomes visible, while the surrounding areas remain hidden. Here, the fragment becomes a way of directing the gaze towards this very absence and towards everything that still exists outside the picture. Mangalanayagam is interested in administrative systems in which the categorisation of people based on skin colour can be traced through Swedish history.

Sången från andra sidan havet, 2026
[A Song from Across the Sea]

4-channel sound installation (15:03 min)
Collaboration with Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist and the Valen choir
Sound design: Jesper Norda

This sound work is performed by Valen [The Whale], a choir with transnationally and transracially adopted participants who have been brought together through an art project by Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist. Here, with their various backgrounds and personal histories, but united by the experience of adoption in Sweden, the choir interprets a musical score from Sweden’s colony on Saint Barthélemy. The original notes came from the diary of Swedish ship’s surgeon Christopher Carlander, written in 1788 on a ship to Saint Barthélemy.

Alternating and joint humming creates a wordless call-and-response in which unconscious memories and forgotten songs emerge. Through this collective action, the work seeks to approach something that we cannot fully understand, but which is part of our collective history. The collaboration brings Mangalanayagam and Bergqvist together in their shared questions about origin, belonging and exclusion, and memories and origins that do not always lend themselves to understanding.

The choir is led by David Juan Andersson and consists of Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist, Veronica D’Arrò, Daniel Cheul Gustavsson, Michael Lee Sørenmo, Linda Mee Engberg, Sara Paulsson, Johanna Zoo-Hee Rydholm, Fanny Kimberly Dahlpil, Emma Neha Bobeck, Andreas Pedro Hallén, Johan Babu, Nana Lidrot and Anna Dilhani Sandgren.

The work was originally commissioned for Colomboscope 2026 and Aranya Art Center. This is version 3.

Stokastisk mimik, 2023–2026 
[Stochastic Mimicry]

4 AI-generated cartes de visite (calling card photographs)

AI-generated images are derived from the data which the systems have been trained on, and are created based on the patterns that appear most likely in this material. But what happens when certain information has been ignored or denied throughout history? What kinds of probabilities do these images rely on? 

When Mangalanayagam began her research on Saint Barthélemy in 2023, AI-generated images were starting to become so realistic that they were hard to distinguish from photographs. By using text prompts to generate images that AI struggles with because the necessary information is absent, Mangalanayagam explores the system’s limits. For example, the prompt “Ulrica Montgomery, born in 1792 on Saint Barthélemy” gave vastly different results, depending on whether or not the descriptor ‘mixed race’ was included. Without mentioning that Ulrica had mixed origins, only images of white women were created. When ‘mixed race’ was added, however, the women were often depicted as Black. What does this say about our notions of who is considered to have mixed origins? By imagining Ulrica with different appearances and skin colours, we can clearly see how our assumptions affect our interpretation of her story.

In a seminal paper on AI ethics, linguist Emily Bender and her co-authors described large language models as ‘stochastic parrots’. Trained on internet archives, they inevitably overrepresent dominant viewpoints and reproduce historical biases, which can harm marginalised groups.

Selection of cartes de visite from the Saint Barthélemy Collection

22 cartes de visite (calling card photographs)
Printed with permission from Stockholm City Museum

A box containing 250 carte-de-visite photographs was recently rediscovered at the Stockholm City Museum. They are portraits of individuals who lived in—or had ties to—Sweden’s colony of Saint Barthélemy. Handwritten notes on the backs of the cards sometimes allow us to trace how children on Saint Barthélemy grew up and aged. The collection includes, among others, Ulla Montgomery—the Swedish-based half-sister of Ulrica Montgomery—and other figures known from archival records.

In her selection of the photographic portraits displayed here, Mangalanayagam focuses on women and children who lived on Saint Barthélemy or neighboring islands. A close look at the photographs reveals traces of individuals who were not intended to appear in the image. One example is a person in a white dress holding a child’s head — a figure who was removed from the photograph after it was taken, through overexposure and cropping. Even where individuals are identified in the photo archive, the artist has chosen to present all the portraits in this exhibition without names. This decision underscores how her work relies on visual speculation, necessitated by the scarcity of archival material preserved from this era of Swedish colonialism.

The Artist Would Like to Thank

Bindi Vora
Neicia Marsh
Fredrik Thomasson, Uppsala Universitet
Jyoti Mistry, HDK-Valand
Annika Raapke, Uppsala Universitet
Cecilia Andersson, Bildmuseet Umeå
Katarina Pierre, Bildmuseet Umeå
Anca Rujou, Bildmuseet Umeå
Mark Sealy, Autograph ABP, London[NM1]
Victor Wilson, Uppsala Universitet
Arlette Magras
Charles Moreau, Musée Wall House, Gustavia
Eddie Stakel
Jérome Montoya
Gunilla Andersson, Göteborgsoperan
Stockholms opera
Teknik på HDK-Valand, speciellt Nina Wallén, Pär Fridén och Mappe Persson
Forskning på HDK-Valand: Agneta Brogren Dahlberg, Li Malmberg Wahle, Lovisa Ljungmark
Carrie Bobo
Angelina Peters
Cecilia Milocco
Archana Khanna
Kristina R. Gaddy
Ingrid Ulfstedt, Sjöhistoriska Museet
Ulrika Björkert, Stadsmuseet Stockholm
Johanna Karlsson, Stadsmuseet Stockholm
Hille Lethi, Stadsmuseet Stockholm
Annika Holmér, Stadsmuseet Stockholm
Karl-Magnus Johansson, Riksarkivet
Roshini Kempadoo, David Bate, Lucy Soutter, May Adowol Ingawanij, CREAM, University of Westminster, London
Miranda Pennell
Michelle Williams Gamaker
Salad Hilowle och Christian Rossipal
Johanna Berg, Etnografiska Museet
Michael Barrett, Etnografiska Museet
Louise Wolthers, Hasselblad Stiftelse
Rory, Una och Klara Kingan
Lisa Johansson