Allan deSouza is internationally acclaimed for his photographic, installation, text, and performance works that restage historical evidence through counter-strategies of fiction, erasure, and (mis)translation.
Krannert Art Museum exhibitions are made possible in part by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Ricker Library of Architecture and Art has developed a library guide with details about this exhibition, as well as supplementary materials and curator-recommended readings: Library Guide for Allan deSouza: Through the Black Country...
DeSouza’s most recent work reenacts and upends iconic colonial narratives of discovery in Africa. Through the Black Country, or, The Sources of the Thames Around the Great Shires of Lower England and Down the Severn River to the Atlantic Ocean is based on the expedition diaries of the Zanzibari crypto-ethnologist Hafeed Sidi Mubarak Mumbai, the fictional great-grandson of the historic figure, Sidi Mubarak Bombay—a formerly enslaved African who, upon gaining his freedom in India, returned to Africa and lead numerous British expeditions across Africa. In this installation, comprised of photographs, diary extracts, and sculptural works, Hafeed sets off to fulfill his great grandfather’s unfulfilled wish—to discover the fabled and elusive source of the River Thames.
In addition to his art practice, Allan deSouza is chair of the department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. His current book project, How Art Can Be Thought, an examination of art pedagogy and a lexicon of terms used within the art critique, will be published in 2018.
Curator: Allyson Purpura, senior curator and curator of Global African Art, in collaboration with the artist
