Rafiki’s interdisciplinary artworks move between photography and bead work, textiles and text, and the use of memorial objects old and new. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki treats art-making as a practice of remembrance, healing, and cultural analysis.
Her images often employ artistic strategies that avert a western anthropological gaze. Incorporating symbolisms, fables, and tools of visual storytelling and oral history, she invokes themes of forced migration and war ghosts, racialized perceptions of Blackness and femininity, and fraught colonial traditions of spatial power and temporal erasure. As a child of the Congolese diaspora with local connections in various countries in Africa and Europe, she taps into pre-colonial forms of global interconnectedness and knowledge transfer.
Rafiki is the founder of Oslo-based platform Rafiki Art Initiatives (RAI).