Artist: Divine Southgate-Smith

Following Southgate-Smith’s solo presentation at Frieze London 2024 with NıCOLETTı, Navigator is the first solo exhibition by the London-based, Togolese-British artist at the gallery. Spanning photographic collage, sculpture, moving-image, text, poetry, and 3D animation, Southgate-Smith’s practice examines conditions of oppression and empowerment by referencing and intersecting black, queer and female experiences.

Central to Southgate-Smith’s approach is a meticulous focus on selecting, ordering, and assembling archival material. Comprising collages printed on diverse materials such as glass, gesso boards and tatami mats, Navigator invites us to consider archives as temporal instruments enabling the envisioning of a future deeply connected to the past. Throughout the exhibition, the artist evokes an Afro-diasporic counter-memory that blends personal, literary, folkloric, and historical narratives, conjuring layered, speculative spaces that (re)map histories beyond prescribed contexts.

Southgate-Smith (1995, Lomé) received her/their Postgraduate Diploma from the The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022). In 2024, the artist received a research fellowship from East Gallery, Norwich, in collaboration with Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts.

Her/their solo and duo exhibitions include Frieze London with NıCOLETTı (2024); EAST Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, UK (2024); CEU open gallery, Budapest, organised and supported by The British council, as a part Photo Festival (2024); PUBLIC Gallery, London, UK (duo exhibition with Emmanuel Awuni, 2024); and Soup Gallery, London, UK (2023). She/they participated in group exhibitions at Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK; Arcadia Missa, London, UK; Palmer Gallery, London, UK; and Studio Chapple, London, UK, among others.