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PV 21st July, 6-9pm
22nd - 24th July, 30th July - 14th August 2022
Bomb Factory South Gallery, Chelsea - tickets available via Eventbrite
“Physical dislocation is an assault not only on one’s memory but also on one's sense of self.
I am fascinated by what it means to belong... to come home and to feel safe and to flourish”
Sol Golden Sato is a painter, installation artist, and creator of public works. Born in Malawi, he now lives in London, following a difficult and turbulent early life where migration was a common feature.
Like many young men growing up in southern Africa between the1980s and 90s, Sato lived
through periods of substantial political change which led to massive migrations from Malawi,
Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. Aged 16 and following the untimely death of his father, he ran away from his homeland, hitching a ride with a drug dealer to end up in South Africa.
It was here, as a homeless teenager living on the streets of Soweto during the last years of
apartheid, that he experienced first-hand how society and power structures organise
themselves in times of disruption and upheaval. Living in migratory Africa at this time was not only traumatic but disenfranchising.
These early life experiences led to the artist's lifelong interest in how rituals and images are
collected, manipulated, and held onto as a way of creating or recreating an identity. Sol calls
himself a long-term migrant: he has gathered things alongside his journey that make him the
man and artist he is today.
“My work is the presentation of identity as unable to identify with itself, but nevertheless grapples with the notion (perhaps only the ghost) of identity itself. I scrutinize the real and imaginary effects of historical and psychological representation. Looking beyond my lived experience, I look at the role social memory plays in our lives and how key events in history shape our histories.“
‘Tales From Lost Souls’ invites us to enter an installation which appears to be a site of family
trauma, hovering somewhere between the strange and familiar, the abstract and the
representational. As we wander through the space, we see paintings, furniture, and other
ephemera, whilst a collaged soundtrack composed of family recordings and nonsensical words fills the air. This is a site where we become acutely aware of our own presence, placed in someone else’s history, but we are not sure if is this a real representation or entirely
constructed.
The paintings in the show are responses to the work of prominent black American artists - the photographer Gordon Parks, and writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker - whose works
resonate with Sol's own experiences of cultural dislocation and displaced identity.
Information
Private View: Thursday 21st July 2022, 6-9pm
Dates: 22nd - 24th July, 30th July - 14th August 2022
Opening Times: Thursday - Sunday, 11:00 - 17:00
Location: Bomb Factory South Gallery, Unit G13 (Lots Road Entrance), The Plaza, 535 Kings
Road, London, SW10 0SZ
Transport: Overground - Imperial Wharf, District Line - Fulham Broadway
Contact: info@bombfactory.org.uk