Clement Siatous “Sagren”
Simon Preston Gallery
[Image: Clement Siatous "Untitled" (2014) acrylic on canvas 27.5 x 34.5 in.]
This event has ended.
Simon Preston Gallery presents Sagren, a solo exhibition of paintings by Chagossian artist Clement Siatous.
Clement Siatous was born in 1947 on the Chagos Islands, a small isolated archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He spent most of his childhood on the island of Diego Garcia until he and his family were forcibly evicted. The entire population of the islands were expelled by the British Government to make way for a US naval base in 1973. The UK Government was responsible for creating a fiction that a permanent population never existed on the Chagos Islands. This claim was made easier to uphold due to sparse photographic documentation that until recently mainly existed in dispersed military and government archives.
Working with acrylic on canvas and employing vivid color, Siatous illustrates his former everyday life in exhaustive detail, documenting the villages and homes of Chagos as well as its copra and fishing industries. The works in the exhibition form part of a comprehensive chronicle of life on the islands. Siatous considers each painting a political act, becoming a platform on which to confront the governments that evicted them. Through his own personal journey of recollection, Siatous issues a defiant rebellion.
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2015 to October 17, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00