My artistic philosophy is underpinned by three interconnected concerns: people, power, and politics. I am fascinated by the relationship between history and time, particularly how knowledge is concealed, transformed, classified, and legitimised through systems of authority. I explore these questions through three interrelated lenses: declassification, evangelisation, and civilisation, asking how they shape our understanding of the past, our experience of the present, and the futures we are permitted to imagine.
Declassification interests me because of what happens to the potency of truth when information becomes accessible decades after the events it documents. Such revelations may transform historical understanding, yet arrive too late to intervene in the circumstances that produced them. Working with archives, I confront the possibility that artistic interventions become theatrical reconstructions of power's consequences rather than meaningful challenges to its operation. Meanwhile, the decisions shaping our own future may remain concealed in the present.
Evangelisation, including the historical expansion of Christianity and Islam, raises questions about the transformation of indigenous spiritual knowledge. I think of spirituality as a civilisational umbilical cord: a connection to the cosmologies, practices, and relationships through which communities have produced artistic and intellectual life. When objects rooted in complex spiritual systems are dismissed as idols, people may become estranged from the knowledge and ancestral ingenuity those objects embody. My research into spiritual provenance asks what an object's history loses when its spiritual relationships are excluded from accounts of ownership, displacement, and restitution.
Civilisation interests me as a claim to authority: who gets to define the civilised, and by what criteria? I question hierarchies that privilege written records over oral knowledge, classify African artworks as ethnographic artefacts while celebrating European formal experimentation as avant-garde, or judge similar human behaviours differently according to geography and identity. I investigate how civilisational claims, sometimes endorsed by purported science, have legitimised racial domination and colonial rule, and how their assumptions persist in contemporary cultural institutions and neocolonial relations.
Research connects my artistic production, curatorial practice, and critical writing. I work across painting, lens-based media, installation, sound, sculpture, text, and performance, treating each medium as a way of asking questions rather than a fixed discipline. My architectural training informs how I approach space, scale, material, and the body, including the possibilities of intimacy and monumentality in site-specific work.
My curatorial philosophy, curating on-the-go, is responsive to the social and historical conditions of a site. It resists rigid intellectual bureaucracy while attending to the relationships between artworks, audiences, and environments. Through movement, proximity, and spatial organisation, I seek to make perceptible not only the work but the life embedded within it.
Writing is equally integral to my research. Often prompted by curiosity, disagreement, anger, or discomfort, it allows me to untangle historical complexity, examine artistic propositions, and develop criticism. It is both an intellectual discipline and a personal process of reflection. Across these methods, I investigate how authority governs knowledge across time, while searching for other ways of encountering history and imagining the future.