Windrush Day

Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop imaginatively recasts histories and the global politics of black resistance in his practice, exploring what unifies and defines these global fights for freedom, visibility and human rights. His elaborately staged photographs are rich in detail and symbolism, in his own words “a reinvented narrative of the history of black people, and therefore, the history of humanity and of the concept of Freedom”. 

In July 2018 Autograph opened Liberty / Diaspora, Diop’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Alongside the exhibition, we also commissioned him to create two new works: our curators invited Diop to visually respond to an iconic image, Zoot Suits, of three black men posing for the camera shortly after the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush, which docked at Tilbury, Essex on 22 June 1948 carrying 492 economic migrants from the West Indies.

For the second work in the commission, Diop chose to reinterpret a photograph of a group of men waiting outside the Ministry of Labour & National Service in Liverpool. The original series of photographs was taken in 1949, and first published in a photo-essay Is There a British Colour Bar in the Picture Post. Both archival photographs are represented in the Hulton Archive, a division of Getty Images, and modern silver gelatin prints have been acquired for Autograph’s permanent collection of photography. 

"The idea behind the two images was to interpret a key moment in (black) history in Britain, and celebrate the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948"

— Omar Victor Diop