Hannah Uzor

Hannah Uzor (b.Lusaka, Zambia) makes work that is rooted her interest and research into both African and diasporic cultural history and how those histories are recalled and transmitted in personal and public memory. Her research-lead practice draws on her own family history as well as histories from the diaspora to make paintings and works on paper that are poetic and richly allusive.

 Uzor draws on archival images, historical paintings, family photographs and literature for each body of work she produces. For her recent show at Niru Ratnam, Uzor was focused on how knowledge in transmitted through generations who have migrated from their homeland, and how memories are conveyed in the absence of archives and conventional historical record. The interplay between tangible mementoes of the past, half-remembered stories and missing pieces of information that have to be re-imagined give rise to a sense of ambiguity in these works, suggesting a delicate process of collective remembering that is always under the threat of erasure.