An installation of two wooden structures, each four-by-four feet, shifting between two- and three-dimensional form. Positioned in open space, they invite movement and embodied viewing. Each square is built from sixty-four 15 x 15 cm plywood panels arranged like a grid or chessboard. Above them hang circular textile prints two feet wide and suspended nine feet high, recalling the umbrellas used by women in traditional African markets for shade and shelter.
The prints feature abstracted images of Sarah Baartman, whose story embodies histories of objectification, displacement, and resistance and whose representation continues to haunt ideas of beauty, body, and fashion, reshaping itself across time and industry. Through these forms, I explore how colonial violence intertwines with our contemporary world. The engraved wooden panels depict figures such as Gordon, Impongi, Mola, and Yola, whose bodies bear witness to enslavement and the empire’s brutality and endurance.
In my ongoing practice, I’ve continued to develop aspects of this work, first presented in 2024 as part of my master’s thesis at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, beyond its original form. The individual woodblock panels, once components of the installation, have evolved into independent pieces that retain their connection to the larger project. Each holds its own rhythm and visual identity, extending the installation’s questions about individual and collective memory, repetition, transformation and its relationship to history.
Building on this process, I am expanding A Huge Pile of Corpses into a series of new works that continue this conversation as an evolving series of works, expanding the conversation on repetition, transformation across materials, generations, and bodies.
