Twelve Gates Arts presents " It is the Sea that Connects Us ", Shiraz Bayjoo’s solo show, curated by Anna Arabindan Kesson. Shiraz Bayjoo’s practice is animated by the legacies of the plantation and unfree labor in Mauritius. He explores the entangled movement of people and commodities that shaped the island’s landscape and located it within an imperial geography. Working between photography, painting and film, he assembles alternate archives of remembrance that imagine futures beyond the ruins, and the limits, of these colonial histories.
A major aspect of Shiraz’s work is a study of geographies and maps resulting from colonial cartographic projects. In this exhibition a series of paintings in jewel-like frames focuses on the intimacies of these mappings and movements, allowing us to see both the colonial violence of geopolitical and economic systems, and also a reimagination of an alternative geography – reframing contemporary movements. Other works in the exhibition consist of a series of intimate photographs of contemporary life on the islands, and single channel video.
The exhibition will coincide with a symposium “Global Plantation Series: A Land of Extraordinary Quarantines” to be held at Princeton University on October 16th and 17th that will comprise a conversation between art historian and curator Anna Arabindan-Kesson and the artist Shiraz Bayjoo in which they will reflect on the convergence of extraction and confinement, of humans and natural world, of labor and memory in his Indian ocean landscapes. How does art help us understand the afterlives of these colonial histories, in our current experience of confinement, and provide alternative possibilities for working through this uncertain present?
Shiraz Bayjoo is a Mauritian artist based between London and Mauritius. Bayjoo studied Painting at the University of Wales, Institute Cardiff, and was artist in residence at Whitechapel Gallery during 2011. He has exhibited at Tate Britain and the Institute of International Visual Arts, London; 5th Edition Dhaka Art Summit; 14th Biennale of Sharjah; 13th Biennale of Dakar; 21st Biennale of Sydney; and is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England. His work is represented in the Sharjah Foundation collection, UK Government collection, and French National collection, as well as private collections both in Europe and Asia. Born in Mauritius, Bayjoo’s work focuses on the Indian Ocean and the European historical legacies that have shaped the region. Bayjoo has been a visiting lecturer and critic at universities both in Asia, Europe, and the USA, most notably the Courthauld Institute, Central St. Martin’s college of Art, MONASH university Australia.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Ph.D., Yale) is an assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies. She specializes in African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century.
It is the Sea that Connects Us will be on view from October 2nd, 2020 to December 19th, 2020. Gallery hours are Wed - Sat: 11-5 and by appointment. For additional information please contact Aisha Zia Khan at (215)-253-8578 or by email: info@twelvegatesarts.org