Everywhere was nowhere, and nowhere everywhere: curated by Mustafa Hulusi

Tanoa Saskraku, born in Plymouth 1995, is a multi-disciplinary artist working across sculpture, filmmaking and drawing. She is currently enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. Sasraku’s banners, including ‘Spectacles in Black,’ are inspired by the Fante Asafo flags of coastal Ghana. Comprised of stitched newsprint they reference Sasraku’s own reflections on what it means to grow up mixed-race in modern rural Britain. Focusing on the Dartmoor countryside, she questions established or assumed notions of ownership when it comes to the ‘rural’ or ‘deep’ English landscape. Sasraku’s work also interrogates her own heritage alongside the question of how black people have been presented on stage and on camera over the last century. Here, for example, the artist has appropriated Carl Van Vechten’s photograph of jazz singer Bessie Smith with a grotesque, caricatured ‘negro’ head resting on her shoulder. The fact that viewers are encouraged to place their head seaside-peep-board-style in the fabric’s hole forcefully repositions how one engages with black representation in the media.