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 an ongoing body of multimedia paintings incorporating natural indigo pigment, silkscreen, acrylic, vintage African textiles, archival newsprint, images, maps, and other combines on canvas, paper, and wood panels.  The series examines the historical and psychological legacies of New World slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, an economic and political system whose violence continues to structure contemporary ideas of race, migration, citizenship, and belonging. In the words of African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, it was “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 new-found El Dorado of the West … They descended into Hell.”

Through processes of layering, erasure, fragmentation, and repetition, I mine and contest images, symbols, maps, texts, and collective memories drawn from colonial histories, assembling them into a visual grammar of ruptured codes and contested meanings. I approach the archive not as a neutral repository of facts, but as a constructed system shaped by power—by what was recorded, what was omitted, and who was permitted to speak. The work examines how enslaved and colonized people were represented, distorted, or rendered invisible within European visual culture, including seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, ethnographic photography, cartography, and other forms of colonial documentation.

This body of works draws upon what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: a speculative method for working within and against the silences of the archive. As Hartman writes, “History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive.” Through speculation, juxtaposition, and repositioning materials, I seek to open spaces for counter-histories, imagining lives, memories, and possibilities that colonial records suppressed or refused to preserve. The paintings become sites where historical evidence, personal memory, and speculation can coexist.

Decolonization represents one of the most profound political, social, and cultural transformations confronted by former colonial powers, including Britain, France, Scotland, and the United States. It requires these nations to reconsider the narratives through which they understand and project themselves. In Britain, the death of Queen Elizabeth II prompted renewed scrutiny of the monarchy’s symbolic and material relationship to empire. At the same time, international movements for reparations, restitution, and the return of cultural objects held in European and North American museums have intensified debates about historical responsibility.

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

— James Baldwin

These developments raise difficult but necessary questions: How should Europe and North America confront the colonial histories that helped produce their wealth, institutions, and national identities? Can the past be judged according to contemporary moral standards? What ethical responsibilities do museums have toward objects acquired through conquest, coercion, or colonial violence? And what might meaningful reparations look like, not only economically, but culturally, psychologically, and spiritually?

These questions remain central to Indigo: Entanglements. What began as a deeply personal artistic inquiry into the histories of the transatlantic slave trade has gradually evolved into a much larger educational and civic project. Through exhibitions, lectures, workshops, institutional collaborations, and sustained engagement with archives and collections, the body of work has become a valuable educational tool for scholars, students, educators, and wider communities seeking to understand how these histories continue to shape contemporary life.

This work feels particularly urgent at a moment when deliberate attempts are being made by institutions and politicians to minimize, distort, or disavow Black history, especially histories connected to slavery, and enslaved people, hence engaging the archive becomes both an artistic and civic act: a way of resisting historical erasure while questioning who controls the production of cultural memory, while honoring the lives and legacies of enslaved ancestors.

Citation of the image archives is available upon request