A royal College of Art Africa Society Exhibition - Translation issues (CAPTIONS)

Chrystal Akakpo

Wo f3 gble

Wo f3 gble (The Sea Never Dries) is an Adangme expression used by fishing communities to express hope, resilience, and abundance. As a Ghanaian-American, my work explores memory, identity, and the connections between Ghana and the African diaspora. Visiting my mother's hometown, Ningo and traveling to Cape Coast Slave Castle, I reflected on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the resilience of contemporary Ghanaian communities.

Through a reconstructed fishing boat, layered nets, and paired photographs, l explore how memory and cultural knowledge are carried, reshaped, and passed across generations. This work invites viewers to recognize the richness of lives beyond Western perspectives. Though we cast our nets on different shores, we share the same sea.

Alesha Pryce

Black Beauty

Black Beauty engages with urgency through its insistence on holding and materialising forms of memory that are often overlooked, fragmented, or at risk of erasure. The work positions the Black hair salon not simply as a cultural space, but as a living archive — one that carries histories of care, identity, resistance, and self-fashioning within diasporic communities.

Liz Omotosho

E sí ọkàn yín sílệ

Reflecting a sense of belonging in an unfamiliar world where blessings are revealed. Through this painting, light is poured into the world, symbolising hope, faith, and spiritual awakening. The women, gathered around and embracing the elderly woman, represent the strength of women and the blessings they carry. The piece brings the spirit and presence of the Celestial Church into the contemporary art world, creating a bridge between spirituality and artistic expression. It evokes both memory and vision, inviting viewers to experience something both deeply rooted and still waiting to unfold

Natasha Muluswela

Meet Us at The Terrace

Meet Us at the Terrace is drawn from life and translated onto canvas, where observation shifts into memory and symbolism. Exploring the duality of nature and hauntology, the composition presents a faceless, haunting presence emerging from the blue sky, connected to a female body reaching towards an eyeless skeletal figure. Between them stands a black-and-white figure, acting as both translator and divider, mediating the space between life and death, presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Through this act of translation, lived experience is transformed into an imagined landscape where fragmented identities and ancestral echoes continue to inhabit the present

Raneece Buddan

We made it home

Focused on African and Indian identity in Jamaica this tapestry combines three types of textiles: Nigerian-Okene, Ghanaian - Kente, Jamaican Bandana.

Ritual of Remembering Series i & ii

The unravelling of one's identity, the longer they're away from home, but the deepening of connection that comes with researching history. This series is a fusion of my textile and ceramic practice.

Laolu Numa

ìlà

ilà (facial Marks/scarification) are an ancient beautification, identification and spiritual practice now largely phased out in Nigeria due to legal restrictions which prohibit the practice as its now considered child abuse.

This piece re-imagines this practice, by constructing a sculptural jaw piece that foregrounds the marks as a wearable architecture. The wearable piece boldly reclaims a prohibited ritual and transforms it into a statement of cultural identity.

Sani Sani-mohammed

Ah sauka lafiya (Hausa for may you arrive safely).

Ki sauka lafiya is a wood assembly relief sculpture work that interrogates identity as an ongoing and contingent process, shaped through labour, migration, and memory.

Centred on the figure of a woman carrying a basket, it invokes the act of bearing and transmitting cultural heritage, wherein the basket functions as a vessel for history, tradition, and lived experience.

As this passage unfolds, fragments are unavoidably lost, suggesting the impossibility of wholly preserving cultural memory. What remains is gathered and reconstituted, pointing to a subjectivity formed through both inheritance and absence.

The material labour of assembling the figure parallels the conceptual labour of negotiating identity within conditions of movement and instability, where structure and fragmentation exist in dynamic tension.

Presented as a freeze-frame, the work adopts the language of monumentality, not as a claim to permanence, but as a provisional arrest within a continuous process of becoming.

Nothando Lunga

Re-figuring Ground

Re-figuring Ground asks how we might reconstitute our relationship to land. By omitting the human figure, the plantation is re-figured as an active presence. The land itself becomes a primary figure, and reflections caused by the high-contrast black-and-white imagery dismantle distance produced by detached observation and situate the viewer within the plantation's spatial and historical continuum. The figure thus emerges not within the frame, but in the act of viewing. In this moment of visual entanglement, the work reorients reparation as a relational and ethical practice that unfolds across past, present, and future and insists on accountability through proximity.

Swapnil Mayank

Widow Dido Ensemble

Widow Dido is a translation of the legendary queen Dido from North Africa's ancient history in the form of a glass painting. The lore of Dido in her court, offering a bunch of grapes, attended by her chambermaids amidst the wildlife of North Africa - addax, serval cat, barbery lion, dromedary camel, African tusker and scorpion betoken the arrival of Aeneas from the fallen Troy.

Biremes anchoring at the cothon - her rotund port, symbolize how Tunisia has been a centre of trade and cultural exchange since ancient times. Summarily, this is an artistic effort to translate what is literary into what can be material.

Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh

Textile For a New African Century

Textile For a New African Century, a printed Kente design derived from a glitch capture by Ghanaian Artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, builds upon a new critical ontology of the Diaspora--one that extends from familiar signifiers and materialities, porting itself into new ideas of African-ness within the coded future of contemporary culture

Lawrence Meju

Kobindi

Kobindi (How My Mind Is) draws from an Igbo expression my family uses to describe one’s inner disposition, and it can be translated to “how my mind is” or “how my heart is,”. Across many cultures, time extends beyond chronology, carried instead through proverbs, oral traditions and lived experience. A figure stands among humanoid forms with clock faces, each marking a different hour. The clock is transformed from a measure of time into a metaphor for individual becoming, suggesting that while we share the same world, we each inhabit our own temporal reality.

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