SHIRAZ BAYJOO

In a series of paintings, these oceanic movements are evoked through pools of colour that bleed over archival images retrieved by Bayjoo from a range of colonial records. 15th century travelogue drawings of botanical species that were commodified and ethnographic photographs of labourers bound up in trading empires are presented in ways that memorialise both the subjects and the colonial enterprise of taxonomy.

This push and pull between resistance and submission, within systems of colonial capitalism, underpins much of Bayjoo’s work. Large textile flags with fringed trim feature abstracted photographs of coastal views and plantations hung to reveal an underside of Kanga fabric, a material culture that evolved through the movement of women and cotton across the ocean’s colonial shipping routes. Ceramic cameo-like sculptures styled to recollect French classical tastes feature reworked historic drawings set against pale icing-like glaze. The scenes show the ocean’s life revolting against its oppressors. Large crabs pincer sailors in an impossible power reversal that speaks more broadly to the ocean’s implication in perpetual cycles of injustice.