Indigo: Entanglements

“While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened”

― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story

Indigo: Entanglements is a new and ongoing body of work comprising multimedia paintings that incorporate silkscreen, vintage African textiles, newsprint, acrylic, and layered assemblage. The series interrogates the unmitigated drama and enduring tragedy of New World slavery and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. These mixed-media works (spanning painting, collage, works on paper, and textile) function as composite reconfigurations of historical realities. The histories they engage are often encountered as archival shadows: fragmented, incomplete, and shaped by the absence of Black voices, which were rarely centered within official narratives. In response, the work challenges and deconstructs normative historical frameworks, using speculation, fragmentation, and newly constructed imagery to propose counter-histories and alternative modes of seeing.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history… the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the newfound El Dorado of the West… They descended into Hell.”

In the wake of the unrest catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter movement, Europe and North America witnessed a brief but intense period in which institutions began to reckon with their entangled histories of slavery and colonialism. Museums, archives, and cultural bodies initiated efforts to examine their foundations through a decolonial lens. However, this momentum has rapidly receded, accompanied by the resurgence of global white supremacist ideologies and deliberate attempts to silence, devalue, and normalize these histories once again.

Decolonization represents one of the most profound challenges faced by former colonial centers—particularly England, France, Scotland, and North America—in terms of political, social, and cultural self-reckoning. As these societies confront uncomfortable truths surrounding empire, slavery, and the accumulation of wealth through exploitation, urgent questions emerge: How should these histories be addressed? Can the past be judged through the ethical frameworks of the present? What responsibilities remain in relation to reparations, restitution, and the vast quantities of stolen cultural objects housed in European museums?

These questions sit at the core of my practice. In Indigo: Entanglements, I mine and contest images, symbols, texts, and collective memories drawn from historical archives. The works explore the human complexity, violence, and psychic residue of colonialism and the slave trade, while also considering their ongoing reverberations in contemporary debates around migration, race, and social conflict across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. I am particularly interested in archival and ethnographic imagery, and in the representation and framing of Black figures within 17th- and 18th-century European painting.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”

— James Baldwin

Each work in Indigo: Entanglements operates as a reflective surface—a mirror held up to the viewer—functioning simultaneously as artifact and provocation. The paintings carry layered registers of cultural, social, personal, and collective memory. They are framed in gold and maple wood, and some pieces are placed behind panes of glass. This glass serves as both a physical and conceptual device: a surface of reflection that implicates the viewer, creating a space of symbiotic visibility between observer and object.

Indigo: Entanglements extends and deepens research and concerns explored in my 2022 Venice Biennale project, Palimpsest: Tales Spun from Sea and Memories, which examined the slave trade and abolitionist movement through the life and writings of Ottobah Cugoano (also known as John Stuart, c. 1757 – after 1791). Cugoano was a seminal abolitionist figure, a political thinker and writer from West Africa who became active in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Captured on the Gold Coast at the age of thirteen, he was enslaved and transported to Grenada before being purchased by the Scottish plantation owner Alexander Campbell, who took him to England as a personal servant. The film installation presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale draws directly from excerpts of this text, accompanied by photographic works and sculptural elements that expand its historical and emotional resonance.

Citation of the image archives is available upon request