I Dreamt of Lost Vocabularies II (2024)

I Dreamt Lost Vocabularies II brings together family photographs, archival fragments and text to trace my family’s history of migration across India, East Africa and the UK. Inspired in part by Indian miniature portraiture, the works use layered imagery and fine detail to explore memory, displacement and diasporic identity across generations.

Working with a small collection of family photographs – some over 80 years old – the series traces my family’s migration across three continents over the course of a century. Beginning with my great-grandfather’s family leaving India for Kenya in 1908 during the construction of the East African railway under British colonial rule, the works also reflect on my grandfather’s expulsion from Uganda in 1972 under Idi Amin when many families were forced to leave with only a handful of possessions.

Through collage and material intervention, the works consider what is lost when photographs, objects and personal histories disappear. Gestural marks, silhouettes and layered surfaces become ways of navigating absence, remembrance and repair while imagining new encounters with the archive and those who came before me. The works also seek to foreground histories of South Asian migration that have often been overlooked within visual culture.

Developed across several chapters, the series was created during a residency with the 20/20 Project at National Museums Northern Ireland in partnership with the University of the Arts London Decolonising Arts Institute.

Mixed media: archival family photographs, gouache, 24-karat gold, ink, archival pen, 19th-century postcard on pigment print and ultraviolet silhouette portrait on glass; 38.5 x 48.5 x 4 cm
Commissioned by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute 20/20 programme x National Museums Northern Ireland.