This panel invites three artists to discuss how their practices mobilize their diasporic identities to counter colonialism’s drive to disrupt and disparage their ancestral past. Silvia Rosi’s Teacher Don’t Teach me Nonsense is a series of self-portraits, which explore the artist’s connection to her (sadly forgotten) mother tongue Mina, a language largely spoken in Togo. Her project explores self-narrative and the histories of language loss through the diaspora and Togo’s colonial history. In Orí Inú, taken from Yorùbá Spiritual Tradition’s meaning of Orí as ‘inner-consciousness’, London-based artist Aisha Seriki looks to her Nigerian heritage for spiritual sustenance. Her performative black and white portraits work in conversation with photographic bronze combs that act as symbols of African diaspora histories, empowerment, ritual and self-care. New York-based Samantha Box will discuss Caribbean Dreams - Constructions, a multi-layered body of work that explores exodus, the transformations that happen therein, and the language of diaspora. Studio tableaux and still-lifes of familial and regionally referent objects, fruits, vegetables and plants draw our attention to the Caribbean’s colonial history, while self-portraits and images from her family albums lay claim to a different autonomous history. 

The speakers will be joined by Dr Taous R. Dahmani, who will moderate the talk. Dr Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator.

Silvia Rosi and Aisha Seriki are winners of the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Their work will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Samantha Box’s Caribbean Dreams: Constructions will also be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.