This talk invites artists Jermaine Francis and Sunil Shah to explore the role archives play in considering the presence and the absence of the black figure in history. Francis will discuss Once Upon A Time, a series of photographic montages the artist created in response to the Anglican Church’s archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. His research focussed on the Anglican Church’s missionary program, material that sheds light on the church’s perceived relationship to the colonial project and to Black and Brown people. A paradoxical relationship that involved the dissemination of purportedly progressive religious instruction, vested interests and complicity in the mechanisms of colonial power. Sunil Shah’s practice looks to his extensive archive of family photographs depicting life amongst Asian diaspora communities in Uganda before their expulsion in 1972. His project 1969 seeks to radically destabilise the function of the archive by subverting the visual registers within the photographs as objects of commemoration, material progress, socio-political and cultural import. Intervening on the surface of his images, Shah creates fragmentary worlds to reveal blind spots of subjectivities, absent personhoods and socio-political conditions inherent in family photographs of diaspora communities living under the legacy of colonialism. 

The artists will be joined by Pelumi Odubanjo who will moderate the conversation. Odubanjo is a curator, writer and PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. 

Both Jermaine Francis and Sunil Shah will be exhibiting their work in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.