Biography

Divine Southgate-Smith is a Togolese-British transdisciplinary artist and poet. Her practice explores archival poetics and material memory to reimage how we record, remember, and relate to time. Through research-led inquiry, she examines the role of cultural memory in shaping imagination by considering the impact of institutional archives on the Black imaginary.

Speculation operates as a central method within her practice, enabling the reordering of archival and ethnographic materials to produce works that move fluidly between intimate storytelling and historical reworking. She approaches the archive not as a static repository but as a “temporal instrument,” an active site for generating Afro-diasporic counter-memories and envisioning futures rooted in Indigenous African knowledge systems. Her work persistently asks how we might imagine better futures if we do not fully know or cannot access our pasts.

Divine Southgate-Smith's solo exhibition, NAVIGATOR, opened at NiCOLETTi, London, in 2025, extending her exploration of archival imagery and spatial poetics. That same year, her work was acquired by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, where she previously exhibited in Power Plants: Intoxicants, Stimulants & Narcotics, 2024. She is currently working with the Living Cultures Collection at the Manchester Museum on 'A Grammar of the Void', 2025–ongoing, a participant-led project that explores continuity, material culture, and storytelling through publication.

Her publishing practice includes A Grammar of the Void, 2025, Reappropriating the Gaze, 2023, TEETH KISSIN' Where Elephants Reside, 2022. In 2022, Southgate-Smith received her Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, Royal Academy of Arts, London, having previously completed her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, 2017. She is the third-place recipient of the Moziac Art Award, 2025, as well as a recipient of the East Gallery Fellowship, 2024.

Current / Upcoming Exhibitions

Solo:

NAVIGATOR

March 6 – April 12, 2025

NiCOLETTi, London, UK

Group:

Hard Evidences

February 13 – March 30, 2025

198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, London, UK

Selected Commissions & Collaborations

Commissioned and collaborative projects with cultural institutions, brands, and artists, including research-led museum projects and cross-disciplinary commissions.

Manchester Museum; Portraits of Recovery; Sola Akingbola; Colford; Soho House; Nuveen; Apple Inc.; Hermès; Browns; Lexus; 2LG Studio; Begg x Co.