The Southern Art Hub and Janet Rady Fine Art are pleased to present UNTRANSLATED, a curatorial project bringing together the work of Bisila Noha, Luma Nascimento, Pantea Mahrou, and Sabrina Da Silva Medeiros at VOLTA Basel 2026.

Bringing together four women artists whose practices examine how memory is carried, preserved, and transformed through materials, landscapes, rituals, and lived experience, the exhibition moves across Brazil, Iran, Spain, Equatorial Guinea, and the wider diaspora. 

Through sculpture, ceramics, painting, installation, photography, textiles, and mixed media, the artists explore the enduring presence of cultural knowledge within contemporary life and the many ways histories continue to shape the present.

At the centre of the exhibition is an exploration of memory as something that exists beyond archives, institutions, and written histories. Across the works, memory emerges through materials, gestures, spiritual traditions, ecological relationships, and inherited forms of making. Clay, ash, soil, glass, pigment, medicinal plants, textiles, found objects, and photographic fragments appear as carriers of experience, holding traces of labour, ancestry, migration, resilience, care, and transformation.

Born in Spain to an Equatorial Guinean father and based in London, Bisila Noha explores identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance through ceramics and mixed-media installations. Drawing upon personal and collective histories, she approaches clay as a living archive capable of holding stories of migration, ancestry, women's labour, and cultural continuity. Her practice establishes tangible connections between land, memory, and the diasporic experience, positioning ceramics as a space where past and present remain in constant dialogue.

Brazilian artist Luma Nascimento works across sculpture, installation, performance, and computational processes. Drawing upon Afro-Brazilian cosmologies and diasporic histories, her practice investigates the body, landscape, and material culture as sites of memory and transmission. Through works that engage ancestry, spirituality, and collective experience, she reveals the enduring presence of knowledge embedded within both human and ecological systems.

Working between São Paulo and Paris, Sabrina Da Silva Medeiros explores healing, spirituality, ecology, and territorial memory through painting, installation, sculpture, and performance. Incorporating materials such as charcoal, ash, medicinal plants, and textiles, her practice reflects on transformation and care while examining the relationships between community, environment, and inherited knowledge. Iranian artist Pantea Mahrou investigates memory, displacement, visibility, and feminine experience through layered surfaces and symbolic forms. Her work navigates the spaces between presence and absence, personal history and collective memory, creating contemplative works that explore belonging, cultural continuity, and the emotional dimensions of migration and identity.

Lucky Temple

While each artist works through a distinct visual language, their practices converge around questions of memory, spirituality, migration, ecology, and cultural continuity. Together, they examine how knowledge is transmitted across generations and how histories remain embedded within objects, landscapes, bodies, and everyday life.

Presented for VOLTA Basel, UNTRANSLATED offers an encounter grounded in attention, material presence, and sustained looking. The exhibition fosters dialogue across geographies and generations while affirming the paramount nature of perspectives emerging from the Global South and its diasporas within contemporary art discourse.

The collaboration between The Southern Art Hub and Janet Rady Fine Art is grounded in a shared commitment to artists whose practices engage cultural memory, material research, and contemporary questions of identity, migration, spirituality, and belonging. Together, the two organisations present an exhibition that foregrounds rigorous artistic practices shaped by lived experience, historical depth, and cultural continuity, while creating meaningful dialogue between artists, audiences, collectors, and institutions across regions.