Burnt Sugar Blue brings together the work of four contemporary artists: Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, and Christina Leslie. These artists’ distinct practices examine the intertwined histories of the Black Atlantic through photography, installation, textiles, print, and mixed media. Curated by writer and artist francesca ekwuyasi, the exhibition concerns itself with how materials become repositories of memory, carrying histories of migration, labour, displacement, survival, liberation, and creativity across the Black Atlantic. Through personal and collective archives, the artists reveal how ancestral knowledge continues to shape contemporary understandings of identity, place, and belonging.

The exhibition takes its title from two powerful materials. “Burnt sugar” evokes the histories of sugar production, enslavement, labour, and the movement of people and goods across the Atlantic. “Blue” references indigo, a dye whose own history is deeply connected to global trade, colonial economies, cultural knowledge, and resistance. Together, these materials become points of departure for artistic practices that reflect on histories of extraction while imagining new forms of connection, care, repair, and liberation. Rather than presenting a singular historical narrative, Burnt Sugar Blue considers the archive as something living and continually reimagined, transforming inherited histories into spaces of resilience, remembrance, and creative possibility.