Frieze London

Frieze London

Divine Southgate-Smith

09.10.24 - 13.10.24



CLICK HERE FOR PREVIEW

 

For its third participation in Frieze London, NıCOLETTı presents a solo exhibition by London-based, Togolese-British artist Divine Southgate-Smith (1995, Lomé, Togo). Spanning installation, sculpture, collage, film, writing and performance, Southgate-Smith’s practice examines conditions of oppression and empowerment by referencing and intersecting black, queer and female experiences.

 

At Frieze, Southgate-Smith presents an installation developed during a research fellowship at East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, organised in collaboration with Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts, Norwich (2024), where the artist studied the collection to explore African traditions of craft and design, specifically the use of glass in Voodoo practices. Entitled Aspects of Things Existing (after a text by 11th-century Persian cosmographer Zakariya al-Qazwini), the exhibition considers the cultural and spiritual function of sculpture in African domestic spaces, as well as the potential of the archive in reshaping established understandings of space and time.

 

These ideas are explored through a display in which, using Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s definition of African sculpture as ‘riddle of a way of seeing’, each artwork refers to folkloric traditions and beliefs in Southgate-Smith’s region of origin. Presented on a wooden platform whose terracotta surface evokes African soil, these works comprise speakers playing the sound of water flowing in a drum, as well as a drawer filled with burnt archives, symbolising the impermanence of history, as well as beliefs in genies materialising in ash.

 

Such relationships with the invisible are also manifested in My voice resonating through ancestral planes, shaking me down to the hips (2024), a lineup of ceramic horns believed to enable communication with ancestors. On the platform, a sculpture composed of two ceramic vessels is filled with Cassava flour – a food staple in Togo –, here suggestive of sand in an hourglass. The artist alludes to food again in Le Rouge ou Le Noir (2024), two glass sculptures based on casts of mangoes, invoking the importance of a tree under which communities gather while referencing Stendhal’s novel about greed. Complemented by an impression on glass showing enmeshing wood, Southgate-Smith’s presentation conjures the economy of (in)visibility within African sculptural traditions, digging stories and artefacts from pre-colonial past to explore a multiplicity of potential futures. As the artist explains

 

I wanted to create a space that fuses, warps and ritualises the potential of the archive, creating an archive in perpetual construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. In this display, I consider that the archive is immaterial, and that as a result, it can manifest itself in multiple configurations instead of being limited to the legitimacy of institutional structures. In so doing I assume that the archive is not bound to reality but is subjected to lived experiences and imagination.



Press

NEWSLETTER
X