Sunlight on the Sea Floor considers shared experiences of colonialism, militarization, migration, and displacement through the work of twelve international artists.
The exhibition takes as a starting point the work of Clement Siatous, which memorializes the struggle and triumphs on the Chagosian people. In the early 1970s, the entire population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony located in the Indian Ocean, were forcibly evicted by the United Kingdom Government to make way for a U.S. naval base. In exhaustive detail, Siatous illustrates a comprehensive chronicle of life on the islands, remembered and imagined, before and after eviction. His paintings reveal a counter narrative to military record, articulating the importance of radical imagination and archiving in the creation of collective memory.
The plight of the Chagosian people is singular but not unique in history, and the exhibition offers multiple perspectives on post-plantation societies, landscapes and lived experiences shaped by imperialism and militarization, through the Indian Ocean and across the world in the Caribbean Sea. While Siatous’s practice anchors the exhibition in the Chagos Islands, it also models an archiving process that is shared with other artists in Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Mauritius, Panamá, Puerto Rico, as well as their diasporas in the U.S. and the UK. Their work explores the shared historical experiences of colonialism, surveillance, and military interventions on displaced communities. The video work, photographs, archives, prints, installations and paintings in the exhibition foster new knowledge and connections about history, identity, and collective memory.
Taking its title from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History,” Sunlight on the Sea Floor shows how creative acts of archiving works against erasure for often-marginalized cultures and histories.
Artists: Audrey Albert, Allora & Calzadilla, Shiraz Bayjoo, José Castrellón, Chagos Research Initiative, Andrea Chung, Christopher Gregory, José Morbán, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Clement Siatous, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Alberta Whittle
Sunlight on the Sea Floor is a traveling exhibition curated by Paula Naughton and Marina Reyes Franco (Curator, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico). It is produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). Sunlight on the Sea Floor is made possible with the generous support of ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum.
