Focus brings together the work of Valerie Asiimwe Amani Jermaine Francis and Sunil Shah to explore interconnected themes of identity, culture, and history.
Focus brings together the work of Valerie Asiimwe Amani Jermaine Francis and Sunil Shah to explore interconnected themes of identity, culture, and history. Their diverse practices intertwine to create a rich dialogue, reflecting on personal and collective experiences through a contemporary lens.
Available to view from both Park End Street at Hythe Bridge Street, these displays are on show 24/7.
About the Artist & Exhibition
Valerie Asiimwe Amani
Hard Things
An Escape
Mahali A Beautiful Endlessness
Valerie Asiimwe Amani's work is often informed by the permeability between the political, domestic, mythical, and intimate. She explores how image sharing and language have shifted our perception of each other and reality. Having grown up across various African cities, including Dar es Salaam, Harare, Kigali, and Johannesburg, language, storytelling and objects were central to ground breaking her identity throughout her childhood.
Her artistic practice, shaped by her cultural background and education in fashion design, remains focused on orature, text, and people. She is particularly interested in folklore, history, and contemporary myth-making, examining how stories after our sense of self in relation to our communities. Having been a foreigner for much of her life, she frequently returns to narratives that explores the implications of displacement, the untranslatable and discovery.
The large fabric work Mahali A beautiful Endlessness is set in an ethereal space, where the figure represents possibility, symbolising the resilient ever-moving part of the human spirit. Collaged fragments act as mapping devices in Hard Things and An Escape; these works are part of an ongoing series of small sculptural terrains titled islands. where the materiality - stitched wood, bent metal, and latex forming skin - reflects living with and within tension.
Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her practice interrogates the ways in which body, language, and myth are used to situate (or isolate) the self within community; with works that bridge the political, domestic and intimate. She has exhibited internationally including group shows in Lagos, New York, Paris, Cape Town and Leipzig, and solo presentations in London and Dar es Salaam. Recent shows include solo, In my Dream we spoke another language at Forster Gallery Zanzibar, performance, Bahari Chumvi at ICA London and Boundary Encounters, Modern Art Oxford.
Amani is currently a PhD candidate at The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. She is the recipient of the 2023 Foundwork Art Prize, The 2022 Ingram Prize and the 2021 Ashmolean Museum Vivien Leigh Prize . Her work has been featured in Art Monthly, Hyperallergic amongst others, with a recent contribution to Texte Zur Kunst.
Jermaine Francis
Lost in Music: A Post-Industrial Dreamscape
Lost in Music: A Post-Industrial Dreamscape is a video piece that explores issues of race, politics, class, and how these have been shaped by what Fredric Jameson refers to as a period of late capitalism. Positioned within the framework of a dancefloor context, the video is situated within the appropriated depot, referring to the hauntology of post industrial spaces of labor. The video’s display allows for viewing both from within and outside via the building’s windows, alluding to the collapse of public and private space in late capitalism. The work itself, like its display, is purposefully collaged in a cacophonic style that mimics the wasteland of information we’re often presented with - fast streams of internet visuals that we can’t fully grasp. It is a space where the viewer is thrown in and out of the narrative, fixed and unfixed.
The video is accompanied by large fabric pieces containing montaged images of personal and public history, incorporating the architecture of rave-style flyers and trade union socio-political banners. The piece explores through aesthetics, notions of hyper-productivity, dance music, post-industrial England, race, and its intersections with class.
Jermaine Francis is a London-based artist whose work in photography and moving images delves into powerful themes of politics, culture, race, class and power. His thought provoking pieces have been exhibited across the UK and internationally, including at the International Centre of Photography Dulwich Picture Gallery. He has been featured in significant monographs such as The Art of Protest and ICP Concerned, and published three books, including Something That Seems So Familiar Becomes Distant and Rhythms from the Metroplex.
Sunil Shah
1969
After a decade of working with his own family archives, attempting to critique the documentary status of the photograph and its ability to represent the past, Shah has arrived at a position of ambivalence. In pursuing a refusal of victimhood (both from the perspective of author and subject), a continued resistance to the principles of institutional archives and the predominant representational mode in photography—all legacies, for Shah, of colonial logic—he sought to find an alternative visual strategy which could express his relationship to this history.
The work is an evolution from Uganda Stories, a photographic project which took as its focal point the forced displacement of Shah's family from Uganda in 1972. This former work told his family’s story through interview testimonies and visual metaphors created from cropped family album photos and found material. These archives, in their even more fragmented form, are now the basis for 1969, a deeper, more personal reflection that uses colour and abstraction as artistic methods to navigate the archive. Shah’s interventions with colour provide a psychic response to isolated details from these photographs. The works are not accompanied by explanations of the image content or details of individual stories—although these exist—rather, they are presented as singular studies and aesthetic propositions.
1969 is a component of Shah’s wider field of intellectual practice, writing and doctoral research which is influenced by Katherine McKittrick’s notion of Black Methodologies. This approach embraces refusal, and methods of disobedience to traditional disciplinary practices; an attempt, for Shah, to liberate his creative labor from oppressive systems of knowledge and power.
Sunil Shah is an artist, writer, and PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, affiliated with Afterall Research. His research focuses on art and exhibition histories, with a particular emphasis on Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking Documenta11 (2002). His solo exhibition, Uganda Stories, has been showcased at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2015) and The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (2018).
