Camara Taylor

A meditation on the work of the trailblazing Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter and an interrogation of the politics of artistic memory, demanding answers as to why Sulter's legacy and impact has been so well-hidden from the wider Scottish artistic landscape.

In suspiration!, Taylor brings false promises made by the United Kingdom to the surface with pieces of news footage and a spoken testimony describing racism in the UK. Amongst this bleakness, moments of beauty shine through, indicating the possibility for reassurance and hope.

A family convenes exactly 500 years after Charles V grants permission to Lorenzo de Gorrevod ‘to import 4000 Africans into New Spain’. The King’s act marks the escalation of a rupture, with its origins in 1492, that remakes the world and reverberates into the present. This apparent “start of slavery” becomes an occasion to tell the story of one family’s implication across time and space. In nobody’s word Taylor digitises and disintegrates the family archive in order to reframe accounts, destabilise claims and inhabit spaces between fact and fiction, questioning the narrative impulses that inform the stories we tell.