More Than One Memory

Masimba Hwati

These two tintypes continue the process of Hwati’s restaging and reshooting of his father’s old pictures using the tintype method. The process involved the artist re-imagining himself into the social, cultural and political conditions to which his father was subjected in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The two original photos were taken around 1965–67, at the height of indigenous nationalistic politics and the liberation struggle, in which the artist’s father fought against the settler British. 

During this time of war, his father was involved in theatre as a pastime when taking a break from fighting. The two tintypes attempt to recreate, in the artist’s own way, his father’s stance, costume and props from two of these theatrical events. Both tintypes were shot and developed by Markus Hoffstätter in Muckendorf an Der Donau, Austria. The first works in this series were shown in States of Becoming, a travelling exhibition curated by Fitsum Shebeshe, under the title calculating my father’s shadow at the Africa Center, New York in 2022.

George Camille

My work probably asks more questions than it answers. I investigate, explore and respond to life cycles and processes through my art, interrogating my modest place within the scheme of things, and in so doing I strive to deepen my personal connection with the forces prevalent in my environment. As an artist, printmaker and sculptor, I am perpetually experimenting with new material and techniques in my creative process. 

Acid bite etchings have become the medium for my more detailed and figurative work. Owning my own press has allowed me to experiment with a range of intaglio print techniques, combining a variety of material and processes to create images which have shaped the development and presentation of my personal visual alphabet. Since I was born and continue to live and work in Seychelles, it is the Indian Ocean environment that permeates, drives and informs everything that I do. I live next to the ocean and its sounds, colours, smells and beauty are represented through form and movement in my work. I hope that through that through my work not only Seychelles in all its astonishing beauty can be seen, but also traces of all of us who pass across it. 

Kearra Amaya Gopee

I employ the word-search format to force the participant to meditate on the relationship between the words, images and their own histories. In this way, short phrases become extended interactions between the participant and the archive. The act of searching for a coherent narrative in a seemingly arbitrary grid of signs and letters is an attempt to make sense of my grandmother and family using existing materials across the space and time of diaspora.

ARTIFACT #2: NYLON POOL speaks to the disorientation that comes to a group of people as they anticipate the end of one of their own, where the one person who has a record of all their histories is at the risk of transcendence. The work utilises the communal nature of the word-search puzzle format, coupled with archival family images to reckon with the gaps in my own family’s history; particularly that held by my maternal grandmother. In our family, her role is that of the matriarch but also as a gatekeeper of our collective histories, the author and guardian of the archive. ARTIFACT #2: NYLON POOL in part is a mechanism for intergenerational communication. Recently, rifts and migration between members of my immediate family have come to a head, which has made the collective history become fractured and less accessible.

Rehema Chachage

Chachage’s research focuses on themes of togetherness and home, using community-centred and generated forms of knowledge. Incorporating expanded research, writing, sensorial installations, embodiment and intergenerational conversations, she forges unconventional pathways that extend an invitation to commune with alternative ways of knowing, intricately woven into generational memory. In collaboration with her mother and grandmother, she embraces the role of a storyteller who canonises a body of work and knowledge while tracing the matriline.

From resonating melodies and whispered tales infusing names with ancestral memories, to the alchemy of recipes carrying the essence of generations, or the sacred craftsmanship inherent in building practices and healing rituals, these diverse knowledge forms become alternative epistemological strategies. They challenge conventions, transforming our relationship with knowledge and legitimising their place in educational and art institutions.

Crediting her work as collective and polyphonic, she argues that acts of “citing” are also acts of repairing, re-membering, and, more importantly, refusing erasure. It is about suturing new narratives into the canon and into history, especially those which challenge the singular and often problematic narratives dominating our understanding of history. Her research and writing process also serve as a platform for honouring matriarchal knowledge and women in her matriline as repository institutions and custodians of intergenerational wisdom, extending an open invitation and offering multiple ways for navigating in collectivity and multiplicity.

Nirveda Alleck

Insular Variations takes the form of installations, photography and video where a body of works are brought together in variating forms that allow multiple dialogues to occur across the visual and sensorial spaces. It is an exploration of insular identities and states of being highlighting isolation and fragility, as well as a hybridisation of traditions synced to the wavering coastlines and land masses. 

More experimental in my approach and using nature and its own force to coerce the art object to take shape and exist, sometimes fused with traditional belief systems and questioning their changeable natures. It also allows me to imagine possible futures, as with the work Arise.

Sanaa Gateja

Sanaa Gateja makes intricate works from post-consumer paper that he rolls into beads, sewing them onto bark cloth supports in tapestry-like assemblages. Up close, the beads offer glimpses, between folds, of their past lives – as vintage posters, pages from wig sales pamphlets and outdated textbooks, among other things. His distinctive method requires the involvement of members of his community, whom he has trained and employed since the early 1990s. 

Gateja envisions artists as agents for social, political, and environmental transformation, and art-making as an act of ecological and spiritual repair. Disrupting conventional distinctions between figuration and abstraction, and two-dimensional work and sculpture, the resulting swirling, mosaic-like pieces instead draw affective connections between people and their surroundings.

Mathieu N. Charles

Racing Mauritius presents us with a personal narrative, interwoven with broader discussions on creolisation and anti-colonialism, shedding light on Charles’ Mauritian heritage and its influence on his worldview. This piece perpetuates a body of work that continuously seeks to dissect and challenge colonial legacies and their far-reaching impact.

In a previous work, Fanon Mixtape, Charles drew inspiration from a key figure in anti-colonial and Black Radical Consciousness, Frantz Fanon, weaving together text, theatre, rap and spoken word to investigate that theme. His third sound piece, AKOMFRAHDIO, furthered this, seeking to critique linear perceptions of time from an anti-colonial perspective, offering an alternative narrative that centres non-Western experiences and knowledge systems. His performance Maggot Brain II: A Soliloquy of Ghosts was a metaphysical journey that paid tribute to the African diaspora, creatively employing text, sound, smell and movement to craft a narrative that spans the African continuum.

Marcel van den Berg

My artistic practice is very much rooted in the memory of resistance and, by quoting the ones before me (dead or alive), I acknowledge the shoulders I am standing on, making connections between past, present and future. On an intuitive level, my use of colour is strongly inspired by Pan African and Rastafari movements. It has been described as a post-colonial expressive answer to De Stijl.

With my use of materials, I want to ask questions about the shelf-life of terms such as neutrality, eternal value, tradition, (de)construction, use, re-use and abuse. In general, I want to question the sanctity, the “holiness” of art. By using coded texts, I wish to excite, trigger, seduce and arouse curiosity for the language, the energy and the emotion that underpins the work.

This work is inspired by Tribe, specifically their 2017 Grammy performance featuring Busta Rhymes. It had so much energy and protest in it. It showed me again the true potential of hip hop music and its everlasting resistance against ruling powers. On a wider approach, it is a general stance against all politicians, all colonial powers, all institutional players and all corporate businesses. It is a statement to those who roam the earth and its people for profit and land. A statement to those who hide their true intentions and refuse to show their hidden agendas.