Art director and visual artist Sarah Masete’s prolific work is driven by an energetic union of curiosity, enthusiasm and a love of community. Born in Stockholm, and now based in Berlin, she is a founding member of Kilowatt, a Black and queer cultural collective organizing techno club nights, film screenings, chess tournaments, and more, for marginalized people in Berlin. The artist has been selected by Olafur Eliasson, as part of his guest curatorship for WeTransfer. She tells Makella Ama why she is guided by a desire to build community in any initiative she undertakes.
From studying psychology, to working in graphic design and experimenting with visual arts in its many forms, Sarah Masete is constantly looking for ways to equip herself with novel tools to change the narrative, irrespective of what she does. This vigor for learning comes from her curiosity—something Masete often drew on growing up in Stockholm, where she was born to Ugandan and Polish parents. Creativity is often thought of as a hobby among immigrant parents, Masete says, however she sees creativity—along with her curiosity—as a catalyst for change and seeing the unseen.
It was in Berlin, where she now lives, that Masete first met Olafur Eliasson, our 2024 guest curator, who selected her to be spotlighted as part of this series: “He’s been like a mentor in many ways. We also share very similar values around diversity and the importance of changing the narrative on how to perceive light and nature. This all also links back to narratives on how Black people are seen through different lights.” (Both physically and figuratively.)
Masete’s own experiments with perceiving light began with a digital camera at the age of 10; a level up from her practice of “trying to take screenshots with the mind.” The art director describes how the “magic always came with the old camera being quite slow, and me feeling little pressure because I was taking pictures of people I loved, and they trusted me and our collective ability to be in the moment.”
However, the act of creating was something that needed to be constantly practiced, and coming from a socio-economically challenging background, she found it difficult to access “great cameras” or editing software. Creativity then had to take second place for her, as she sought to gain a sense of security through academics. “My parents’ focus was on survival, and by extension, my focus was on security through homogenized routes.”
Over time, though, Masete realized that she was more interested in academics as a form of study outside of institutions. Finding an entry point into doing so, however, was a difficult process in her hometown of Stockholm, in what felt like a city where so many people around her had already been working on their craft for so long. “That’s what initially led me to begin experimenting with AI. I didn’t really know where to start, and with this new software I went from having nothing to having a time travel box and a hypothetical team. I could work on my own art direction, change narratives and make things whatever I wanted them to be.” In an age where the use of AI is a highly-contested practice, Masete poses an alternate viewpoint in how using the medium can act as a road opener to editing and photography without economic limits, and this can be observed in works such as “Disruption,” where we see a shared stillness between two figures “we don’t know if they’re also grieving or if they’re in a more intimate setting.”
The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.
