POV: sweet as it’s kept (2024), work resulting from a residency at Way Out East Gallery (UEL), video-object on screen, variable dimensions, Way Out East Gallery, London.
POV: Sweet as it’s kept explores the hidden and suppressed histories of the Docklands, a site shaped by Britain’s colonial and economic power. Beneath the polished façade of contemporary neoliberal order lies a landscape marked by exploitation and erasure—histories smoothed over by the narratives of imperial triumph. This work examines the residues of these "impurities," the silenced voices and stolen lives that fuelled Britain’s rise as a global superpower.
Anchored in the maritime concept of the “arc of visibility”—the portion of the horizon over which a navigational aid is visible—the work reframes the Docklands as a site of negotiation between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. The installation uses video, sound, landscape and microbiological elements to center the perspectives of "bodies in water," bringing into focus the inter-subjective histories of labor, displacement, and resistance that ripple through this site.
Through striking visual and auditory contrasts, POV: sweet as it’s kept interrogates the sanitized narratives of economic progress that dominate the Docklands. The shimmering purity of a sugar crystal—a material emblematic of Britain’s extractive colonial economy—becomes a metaphor for the racialized capitalism that continues to shape this landscape. The work asks: What happens when these obscured histories resurface? How might they reshape our understanding of the present and future landscapes of the Docklands?
By examining the limits of visibility and critiquing the systems that obscure histories of exploitation, POV: sweet as it’s kept invites viewers to confront the ongoing impact of imperial greed.