TRANSPORTATIONS THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

This graphic artwork, titled Transportations Through Technology, is from the Dubship I – Expanded Universe series, which debuted at the Dakar Biennial of Contemporary African Art in 2022. It was printed 5 metres high for that installation. The poster has an an accompanying Augmented Reality (AR) experience which brought the sculpture Dubship I – Black Starliner to audiences at the Biennial as an animated 3D model hovering in front of the poster.

To access the AR experience, visit this page and install the app on your phone, then point your camera at an image of the poster. If you want to download a copy of the poster to print out or view on screen, do that here.

The graphic artwork is a collaboration with South African comic artist Loyiso Mkize – we met through exhibiting work together on the show Still here tomorrow… at the Zeitz MOCAA in 2019, where the Dubship sculpture was launched. Loyiso has his own comicbook series Kwezi (whose symbol is also a 5-pointed star incidentally) and has drawn for such stellar series as DC’s Batman. The AR experience was crafted by multi-talented digital artist Sean Devonport.

The theme of ‘transportations through technology’ follows a thread through Marcus Garvey’s repurposing of the ocean liner from a tool of colonial extraction to a means of return for the descendants of African slaves, through dub music’s sonic transportations to an imagined Africa, onwards to space travel as a metaphor for transcendence over oppression (as seen in dub album cover artwork) into today’s technology of the metaverse: Augmented and Virtual Reality (together, Expanded Reality or XR) as a means of transporting artwork to audiences across distances.

Transportations Through Technology was shown on the exhibition Dig Where You Stand at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary African Art (SCCA) Tamale in Ghana, along with the Dubship sculpture, in September 2022. While visiting Accra on our way to Tamale, we installed a smaller print inside Black Star Gate, Ghana’s memorial to its founding father Kwame Nkrumah, who was inspired by Marcus Garvey and the Black Star Line in his nation’s fight for independence from colonial rule.