WeTransfer Guest Curator
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.”
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There are certain things you can’t capture; some things, you can only really see in passing.
Throughout Masete’s works, there is an element of slowness, or, perhaps, a knowing sense that only a small moment of figurative time has been captured. There’s a recurrence of figures running and escaping together, and, at times, it is difficult to know where they’re going in their own universe. For Masete, this is a method of “giving the figures the space they also need because there are certain things you can’t capture; some things, you can only really see in passing.”
This idea of giving or creating space is something Masete is preoccupied with not just figuratively but on a practical level, too, and it is evident in the work she does with Kilowatt. A Black and queer cultural collective, Kilowatt actively supports communities who are marginalized or overlooked in the city of Berlin with its techno+ club series. Techno, an electronic dance music genre with tempos typically being in the range of 120-150 beats per minute (bpm) is characterized by its use of heavy repetition, synthetic textures and futuristic themes. Pioneered by The Belleville Three in the basements of Detroit, the focus of this genre is an adrenaline-like rhythm that moves, wakes and shakes. For Masete, it was somewhere between these 120-150 bpms that she found herself again after a period of grieving and visiting Berlin. “I’d gone to a party because I didn’t want to go home and have the reality hit me even further. I knew I also didn’t want to drink, so I closed my eyes and went through a journey of releasing with my body. I just felt the music and allowed my body to go through what it needed to go through,” she says. “Extended time here made me realize that a lot of spaces playing techno weren’t welcoming to Black people. Eventually, I found a community through Kilowatt and I’m navigating accessibility within the club space with them as an art director.”
Together with Juel Tekie, Devin Pope and Liwia Stern, the Kilowatt team are also exploring what community for a shared love of techno can look like beyond the dancefloor, and are pioneering initiatives such as chess tournaments, film screenings, as well as collaborations with the collective The New Originals. Kilowatt’s existence exemplifies how techno, as a genre and movement, has gone beyond the days of simply being known as “oonts oonts music,” she says, “there is so much legacy behind it.”
As a second-generation immigrant who has faced barriers to access, Masete is also determined to pave the way for those who are just beginning their careers, through Routes In, which is a volunteer-led initiative with programmes that offer mentoring for young people to shape their creative journey. In whatever she does, we see a continuation of the tangible thread of curiosity and enthusiasm that allows the polymath to have a cohesive outlook in all of her works and projects. “My biggest dream is to thrive together with others,” she says. “I will happily stay up all night in order to do this.”
