Adam Seid Tahir (they) is a Swedish/Eritrean choreographer and performance artist who works inter-disciplinarily to create works whose scenography moves in the borderlands between art and technology. They reinterpret histories and mythologies of Sweden through a queer and Afrodiasporic perspective.
Amina Seid Tahir (she/her) is a Swedish/Eritrean artist and choreographer. She works with dreams as a tool for Black queer resistance and healing. She often weaves together oral traditions, rituals, and myths, creating through these embracing fictional universes for others to experience.
In their work, they are interested in fiction and world-building. Through their works, they construct emotionally and sensorially charged fictional worlds that propose alternative realities. Fiction becomes a tool for resistance and for questioning and critiquing societal structures.
An important thread in their practice is the idea of an Afro-Nordic mythology. To Nordic mythology and folklore narratives, they seek to add voices and stories from people of different backgrounds, those who carry multiple belongings, have mixed heritage, and live in diaspora in Sweden.
Adam and Amina had two residency periods, one during the winter of 2024 and one during the autumn of 2025, to research and develop the exhibition to excavate the sun.
With the exhibition, they wanted to explore how we can come together collectively in the darkness of the winter months in Sweden and how we can create spaces for closeness, warmth, and care.
Adam & Amina Seid Tahir, Residence Botkyrka, 2024
to excavate the sun
Adam Seid Tahir and Amina Seid Tahir
8 Nov 2025 – 21 Feb 2026
Botkyrka Konsthall
How do we find one another in the darkness?
The exhibition to excavate the sun invites visitors into a fictional world where the sun lies hidden beneath the ground. A world in which light does not exist on its own, but must be excavated together. Where warmth emerges only when we seek it collectively.
How do we create closeness and community, a place to meet in care?
During the Nordic winter, when darkness weighs most heavily upon us and the days shrink into shadows, the exhibition in Botkyrka Konsthall is open. It is a time when we often withdraw, close doors, and sit alone. The exhibition explores darkness and collective strategies for finding light together during this time of year.
The artists draw inspiration from bats’ collective echolocation as a way of navigating the dark, and from the sound of ilillta, an Eritrean vocal tradition in which the voice is used to convey far more than words.
In to excavate the sun, the visitors are invited to join each other in using specially designed tools, moving in a shared rhythm to dig into the earth and uncover the light or to build own dream worlds.
Botkyrka Residence is supported by Botkyrkabyggen.