In Some of Us Aren’t Really From Here, Rosel Jackson Stern painted beings who seemed to ask for more than recognition. Their 2022 Stockholm exhibition proposed that stories fractured by displacement might find another form through portraiture. The figures were not offered as illustrations of a known family history. Stern described them as beings who made themselves known through the process of painting. That distinction gives the work its tension. A portrait usually promises access to a subject. These paintings, by the artist’s account, began with an openness to what could not yet be named.
Stern called the exhibition an encounter with Afrofuturism and Black science fiction. Their own presentation of the show speaks of ancestors, gaps in knowledge and the possibility of a future that can become hard to imagine after trauma. The paintings do not appear to solve those gaps by supplying missing documents. They offer another kind of meeting. A figure can be encountered without claiming to know everything about its origins. That is a form of imaginative care, and a demanding one: it leaves room for uncertainty without surrendering the right to make a world.
This is an Afrofuturism that takes the future seriously because it does not assume access to the past is complete. The familiar image of a technological tomorrow would be beside the point. Stern’s work asks how a person or community can project forward when inherited knowledge has been interrupted. The beings in the exhibition do not have to stand for fixed identities. They can carry the possibility that a lineage continues even when its record is broken.
Stern identifies as a Swedish, mixed-race Black nonbinary artist. Their site describes a practice that spans painting, writing, journalism and curation, with periods of work in Sydney and London as well as Stockholm. Meditation and prayer are part of their way of making portraits, and Black iconography from the continent and diaspora informs the images. The work approaches figures not fully known in advance through those chosen methods.
Beings rather than examples
The title Some of Us Aren’t Really From Here can be read in more than one register. It can suggest alienation in a place that calls someone foreign. It can also imply an origin beyond the coordinates that a state or neighbourhood can assign. The work’s stated relationship to Black science fiction allows both readings to remain open. The artist does not insist that the beings come from a literal other planet. Instead, the paintings make room for lives that cannot be made fully legible by the categories available to them.
That openness is important to the form of the show. A painting of a figure can invite the viewer to classify it immediately, to decide who it is and what it represents. Stern’s description asks for a slower encounter. The beings have stories, but those stories arise through the artist’s creative process rather than arrive as captions with complete explanations. The viewer meets them with some knowledge withheld. A future in which Black life is possible on its own terms may need precisely that refusal of compulsory explanation.
The artist’s stated debt to Black women and femmes is also a source of the work’s address. In describing the exhibition, Stern placed the figures within a community of care. The exhibition was made with an audience in mind. It sought to give space to people whose parts of themselves have been treated as disposable or strange.
The show took place at Konsthall C in Stockholm in 2022. In an installation photograph on Stern’s portfolio, one canvas holds two angular figures against a charcoal ground. A yellow disc glows behind the taller figure, while violet, blue and ochre planes make faces that appear assembled rather than copied from a sitter. A neighbouring orange canvas isolates another figure whose deep-blue hair or head covering curves over a face divided into bright geometric colour. The palette refuses the drabness often assigned to narratives of loss. These beings occupy the wall with the force of invented presences, their faces constructed from planes rather than resolved into photographic likeness.
The artist’s practice resists a clean division between spiritual and speculative. Prayer and meditation are described as working methods. Afrofuturism and Black science fiction are named as sources for a show. These are not equivalent terms, and one need not reduce prayer to a device for futuristic imagery. Their meeting is more interesting. An act of listening before painting can make a portrait less about imposing a design and more about attending to what emerges. A speculative being can make such attention visible without pretending it is a documentary record.
Sydney, Stockholm and the choice of home
The later series On God extends Stern’s interest in figures formed through uncertainty. Their site describes four acrylic portraits made during a period in Sydney, when the artist had moved without a secure job or permanent home. Stern’s first-person account says they closed their eyes before choosing colours and listened for the figures that might appear. The portraits were later shown in Stockholm in a programme connected to Altar Space and Southnord. The path of the work matters: made during a move away, the paintings returned to a public context in the city where Stern had grown up.
The story could be told as personal bravery, but that would miss the material of the paintings. The relevant artistic choice is to let a figure take shape without fully planning it. Stern frames that choice as a kind of trust. A painter still makes decisions about colour, surface and the completion of a canvas. Yet the process is described as responsive rather than entirely predetermined. The finished portrait bears the result of that responsiveness. The viewer does not see a transcript of the artist’s meditation, but can see a figure made under its conditions.
Stern’s account of Sydney is also careful about uneven risk. Trusting an uncertain future is not the same demand for everyone. Race, gender and sexuality can alter the stakes of leaving a familiar place, of lacking a secure address or of becoming visibly unknown. Their first-person statement connects the making of On God to those differences without treating the portraits as simple records of hardship. They are works produced in the space between risk and possibility.
In 2023, Stern and Anna Shen made How Do You Spell Home? for a Pride programme at Kulturhuset Lava in Stockholm. The city institution’s annual report confirms the exhibition and its two artists; Stern’s portfolio provides the fuller account of its questions. Shen spoke from the experience of transnational adoption and a changed name. Stern spoke of choosing to move abroad and finding home in community and creative practice. Their circumstances were not identical. The exhibition’s value lay partly in setting different routes to belonging beside one another without smoothing them into a single migration story.
The word home can sound reassuring until someone has to say who grants it. In the duo exhibition, home is made rather than merely inherited. A place can be chosen, but choice is shaped by history and social reception. Stern’s statement about growing up in Stockholm describes a feeling of unease shared, in their view, by many Afro-Swedes. Their later sense of home in art is not a claim that a studio cures exclusion. It marks a practice in which they can form a relation to figures, stories and other people outside the terms that made belonging difficult.
This is one reason the sequence from Some of Us Aren’t Really From Here to On God to How Do You Spell Home? is more than a repetition of identity themes. The first show asks how interrupted lineages might find imaginative figures. The second describes making portraits through attention to the unknown during a move. The third stages a conversation about chosen and imposed homes with another artist. Their methods and audiences differ. The continuity is a refusal to let a single place or fixed account decide what a person may become.
Rest as a space in which worlds appear
Stern’s later series Afrosvensk Vila, or Afro-Swedish Rest, takes stillness as an artistic problem. Made for the group exhibition PAUS at Stockholm’s Scenkonstmuseet, it consists, according to Stern’s site, of three acrylic paintings measuring 150 by 100 centimetres. The museum’s exhibition page describes the work as an exploration of what happens when people enter stillness, who or what is there, and what worlds can flourish in its presence. That institutional description matters because it confirms both the series and a question that extends the artist’s earlier portraits.
Rest can be misread as an absence of action. Stern’s series treats it as a condition of possible encounter. What appears when a Black person is allowed to stop performing endurance for someone else? What kinds of figures or worlds are perceptible when attention is no longer consumed by constant defence? These questions develop the artist’s own description of the series as a story about the courage needed for Black people to rest with ease. The claim is specific. Ease is not assumed to be universally available; making room for it can itself require an act of courage.
The museum context sharpens this question. PAUS brought together several young makers, each asked to respond to the idea of a pause. Stern’s paintings appeared among works in film, installation, fashion and photography. In the artist’s portfolio image of Afrosvensk Vila, one canvas shows a figure from behind against a field of blue. A red garment occupies the centre; one arm lifts toward the back of the head and neck. The turned figure withholds a facial expression from view. The painting gives rest a posture rather than an emblem. The viewer cannot read the person’s expression, and the blue surrounding the figure leaves the moment open rather than supplying a setting or a reason for the gesture.
The scale of the three canvases is worth holding in mind. At 150 by 100 centimetres each, they are not tiny private notes, even if their subject is inward attention. They claim wall space in a public museum. Stillness becomes visible to strangers. That move turns an intimate need into a subject for collective looking, with all the difficulty that collective looking can bring. The paintings ask for attention without requiring their figures to explain themselves completely.
The writer’s ear and the painter’s hand
Stern has also written and reported for publications including gal-dem. Their portfolio describes a 2021 article about prayer among Black queer people and a 2022 conversation with Leona Nichole Black about love and attention. Those topics are related to the paintings without being interchangeable with them. Writing can bring other voices into a piece and record a conversation; portraiture can hold a presence that has no interview transcript. The artist’s movement between them is not a mere list of occupations. It is a recurring test of what each form can make available.
The paintings described as channelled beings invite a different kind of attention from a reported conversation. Their colours, cropped bodies and angular faces do not offer the fixed coordinates of a biographical portrait. In Stern’s hands, a figure can remain a presence whose identity arrives gradually through looking. A written interview opens through another person’s words; a canvas can hold a silence that the viewer has to meet without immediately filling it.
In Krull’s interview with Julie Dash on speculative fiction, the filmmaker describes finding a narrative structure that could carry a community’s memory without submitting to a standard Western story. Dash’s film and Stern’s paintings differ profoundly, but both make form part of the question of whose history can be told. Stern's painted figures and settings give shape to stories that the surviving record does not fully hold. Colour, posture and the space around a body carry the work's imaginative claim without pretending to reconstruct a lost scene exactly.
Stern’s paintings occupy that careful territory. Their beings may arise from meditation and Black iconography, but the artist does not present them as substitute archival facts. Some of Us Aren’t Really From Here locates them where imagination can meet fractured memory. On God brings them through an account of movement and faith. Afro-Swedish Rest allows a question about stillness to become a public series of images. Each project makes a different room for what was previously hard to see.
Afrofuturism has room for the spaceship, the machine and the spectacular new city. Stern’s 2022 show chose another route. A portrait can mark the existence of someone a conventional history has failed to name. A room in Stockholm can hold beings made through listening. A future can begin with the freedom to leave their stories partly open. Stern’s work asks what happens when the unknown is treated not as a deficiency to be corrected, but as a place where a figure might arrive.