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Beyond the Hold, installation view, Firstsite. Photo Jayne Lloyd

BEYOND THE HOLD

Part of the solo exhibition It Should Not Be Forgotten, Firstsite, 29 March – 6 July 2025

Twenty-nine Colorado prints on Phototex

1485 x 2722.5 mm each

Accompanying soundscape

Duration: 19:12 mins, loop

Beyond the Hold is an immersive photographic and sound installation that engages with Christina Sharpe’s writings concerning the Slave Ship’s Hold. It explores the Hold not solely as a site of confinement and mortality but also as a profound representation of the resilience deeply embedded in the human spirit.

At the heart of the work are twenty-nine larger-than-life-size photographs capturing performative gestures that, through a diasporic Black lens, probe the psychological and physical states of those coerced into captivity. The images are installed directly onto the gallery floor, echoing the spatial arrangement of enslaved bodies within the hull of a slave ship.

“This interplay between political and personal, trauma and strength runs throughout. The show includes grim reminders of Britain’s role in trafficking African people, while also subverting and challenging conventional historical accounts by offering new perspectives.”— Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper

Visitors were invited to remove their shoes before entering the space, encouraging a deeper, more tactile engagement with the history the installation evokes.

Beyond the Hold is accompanied by an elegiac cello soundscape composed in collaboration with London-based Estonian cellist Kirke Gross.