About this Event
Join us for a thought-provoking exhibition tour and conversation with London-based mixed-media artist Nefateri Asantewa. Her collection, The Middle Passage Remembered, integrates fine art, historical memory, and immersive technology to explore complex historical narratives and their enduring cultural legacies.
Don’t miss this chance to connect, learn, and honor their legacy together!
TOUR OF EXHIBITION
Through selected works, Nefateri will reveal the stories, symbolism and creative processes behind her exploration of the transatlantic journey reflecting on displacement, memory, ancestral presence, survival and resilience across the African diaspora
ARTIST IN CONVERSATION
The Middle Passage Remembered
Memory, Representation and the Reconstruction of African Diaspora Identity.
Beginning with selected works from Asantewa's practice, the conversation will bring the artist into dialogue with historians, scholars, cultural thinkers and to ask how we remember histories in which the voices of those who endured them are so often missing from the archive.
The conversation
The Middle Passage displaced millions of African people across the Atlantic world. Yet behind the historical numbers were individuals with names, languages, families, spiritual traditions, knowledge, occupations, memories and imagined futures.
Who tells their stories now?
Through Asantewa's work, our panel will travel beyond the conventional narrative of slavery to explore the African lives that existed before the crossing, the cultural worlds reconstructed after it, and the identities created by descendants across Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, the Americas and the wider diaspora.
The discussion will consider questions including:
- Museums and representation: How should museums, galleries and cultural institutions interpret histories whose records were largely created by colonial and commercial institutions?
- Art and technology: Can sound, digital media, augmented reality and immersive art create new ways of encountering and understanding difficult histories?
- The age of AI: If artificial intelligence learns history from incomplete or biased archives, what will AI remember and what might it forget?
- Before the Middle Passage: What is lost when African diaspora history begins with enslavement rather than Africa?
- Trauma and resilience: How can we remember the brutality of enslavement without allowing trauma to become the defining narrative of Black identity?
- Inherited memory: Can historical trauma travel between generations? Can cultural resilience, creativity and ancestral memory travel with it?
From remembrance to the future
If future generations increasingly encounter history through digital archives, algorithms and artificial intelligence, who will ensure that African and diaspora perspectives form part of the knowledge from which those technologies learn?
About the Artist
Nefateri Asantewa is a London-based mixed-media artist of African-Caribbean heritage whose practice explores memory, identity, resilience and the African-Caribbean experience.
Her Middle Passage Remembered project brings together visual art and contemporary forms of storytelling to reconsider the transatlantic slave trade not simply as an historical event, but as a continuing site of memory, cultural inheritance, reflection and creative reconstruction.
Special Note: The exhibition is open, free to the public from 25 September, Wednesday-Saturday: 12 noon - 4:30pm.
Event venue & nearby stays
NIAS Creative Campus, 12-14 Hartfield Road, Wimbledon, United Kingdom
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