I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies

For the exhibition, Autograph commissioned the artist to create a new collage, Night Circles. Together, Nadeem's works explore the intertwined nature of tourism and imperialism and how landscapes are disrupted and reshaped. The artist asks us to consider what is visible, what is marginalised and what has been deliberately cut away.

Tirvengadum has few images of her family prior to the 1960s. To reconstruct her family album, she trained an AI model on the photographs that do exist from her personal archive and wider extended family network, prompting generative AI to visualise her family’s lost history. Moments of togetherness are imagined: birthdays, studio portraits, family gatherings. These constructed images complicate the boundaries of truth, questioning what has been lost, hidden or never existed.

Trespass was created over 3 years, each chapter produced in a different location: Berlin, the artist’s kitchen in London and Essex County. Figures, including Gupta and the people close to him, emerge through fragments of texts and constructed imagery. The series remains a powerful reflection on urgent conversations that continue to arise, underscoring the often-fragile intersections of masculinity, migration and resilience.

In her tapestries, Wood reflects on the nature of rest in an unrestful age. The artist’s body appears in various states of repose – either within her bedroom or reflected in a mirror – surrounded by coded text referencing the invasive marketing of beauty products from social media. The work highlights how screens reshape our self-image, complicating the sense of privacy: even these moments of stillness can be influenced, broadcast and consumed digitally. By centring fatigue and disillusionment with online culture, Wood reminds us of the impact of turning our bodies into commodities in the digital age.

Man on Fire explores themes of violence and resilience through layered imagery and evocative gestures. Reflecting on the story of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a 35-year-old Mozambican man who was burned to death during a wave of xenophobic violence in the Ramaphosa settlement in Johannesburg in 2008. In the lead-up to the attack, migrants were accused of being responsible for crime and 'stealing’ jobs from the area, allegations that fuelled a surge of anti-migrant violence. His story became a symbol of the tragic consequences of xenophobia and economic inequality in South Africa. For Toeba, gestures become repeatable forms that evoke imagery the artist has previously encountered. Here, the image of a choir singing in Soweto frames the composition, while at its centre Nhamuave’s portrait arrests our gaze. It does not simply sit within the work; it demands to be looked at.

By digitally altering the slides to reference the lineage between her socialist grandfather – a political activist executed for his politics during the Cold War – and her son born in London at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using the archive as an unstable site for photographic time travel, she inserts their figures into the glass slides to create a chronotopia, a ‘collapsing or shifting of time and space’.

The artist does not seek to use the archive to heal these histories, but to examine how they continue to haunt the present. Fragmentation becomes a strategy to reconfigure images created under violent colonial regimes, exploring how history can be restitched to create counter-narratives.

The work features hand-built life-sized, theatrical scenes, richly layered with symbolism drawn from activists’ testimonies from the Women Life Freedom movement in Iran, and stories from the artist’s mother, who was imprisoned in Iran in the 1970s due to her political activity. Chequerboard patterns reference the games those detained must play to survive, as tools of resistance and agency.

A Veil of Memories weaves together layers of maps and images - merging the warp of memory with the weft of reality. Using photographs of her grandparents, Akhanda constructs a fabric in which the image of her grandmother’s sari becomes a symbolic shield, protection amid the tumultuous times following partition.

In this mixed-media assemblage, Andrew exposes intersecting histories of oppression and resistance. Among the objects used are a press image of a gay rights demonstration in New York City in 1979; a music record by Harold Blair, an Aboriginal tenor and activist; and the front page of Le Petit Journal published in 1902, depicting France as a saviour rushing to Martinique after the Mount Pelée eruption - an image that masks colonial power as benevolence. These historical fragments are encased in sapelli wood, a material originating in West and Central Africa, often associated with resource extraction and the economic structures of empire.

In Expiation, these concerns are articulated through a diaristic approach where expressive marks, handwritten letters and photographic collage converge around a nude figure portrayed as a liberated being. Hwami’s surfaces are charged with interruptions – vivid brushstrokes, plant forms and distorted bodies glitch into view, disrupting any singular or fixed reading. By transforming personal and familial archives into layered constellations, Expiation foregrounds these identities as a site of reinvention and possibility – reimagining identity as something multiple, provisional and in motion.

Pattern Recognition examines how different nationalities’ passports grant, or deny, access to international travel. Each country is arranged within a pyramid according to the 2022 Henley Passport Index, which ranks nations by the number of destinations their citizens can enter without a visa. Countries with greater freedom of movement appear larger and higher on the chart, while those facing more restrictions are rendered below in smaller scale. This global ‘mobility map’ sketches a stark portrait of a divided and unequal planet. National borders appear not as fences or barricades, but as constraints shaped by policy and privilege.

During this period, Ethiopian patriots – known as the Arbegnoch – mounted a fierce campaign against invasion by Benito Mussolini’s Italian forces. The artist spent many years collecting rare 16mm archival film of the conflict to create Unveil. He meticulously spliced together each frame to create a composite portrait, zooming into the faces of thousands of Ethiopian fighters.