Aaiún Nin: Oil of blood and our bodies tormented, exiled
– Angola
Aaiún Nin (* 1991) is a poet, activist, and mixed media artist from Angola. Their works explore and confront issues of gender, race, and sexuality, in the context of postcolonial Africa and also through the experiences of migrants in Europe.
In 2016, after prolonged social and physical persecution, Aaiún Nin was forced to move to Denmark and published there their first poetry collection in Danish På min huds sorthed (On the Blackness of My Skin, 2021). The Danish Refugee Board refused to grant Nin asylum in Denmark, despite the ongoing risk of public persecution of openly LGBTQI+ people in Angola. Because of that, they moved to an ICORN residence in Kraków, Poland, where they were in ICORN residence in 2021–2023 and published there their second poetry collection Broken Halves of a Milky Sun (2022), in English. In 2023, Nin took up the ICORN residency in Bern, Switzerland.