About

Divine Southgate-Smith is a Togolese-British artist and poet based in London. Working across collage, animation, video, sculpture, text, performance, and installation, her medium non-specific practice explores archival poetics and material memory as tools to reimagine how we record, remember, and relate to time. Her research examines the contemporary implications of the institutional archive on the Black imaginary, drawing on Black Indigenous perspectives and blending historical, personal, and folkloric narratives.

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Speculation is central to her approach. Through the careful selection and reordering of archival and ethnographic material, Southgate-Smith creates works that move between intimate storytelling and historical reworking. These layered compositions evoke Afro-diasporic counter-memories, treating the archive as a temporal instrument essential to imagining futures deeply connected to ancestral knowledge. Her work frequently engages ideas of time-space compression, non-linear temporalities, and the role of imagination in shaping memory.

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