Burnt Sugar Blue

Burnt Sugar Blue

September 11 – November 8, 2026

Opening Reception, Thursday, September 10, 6:00 – 8:00 pm.

Burnt Sugar Blue brings together the work of four contemporary artists: Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, and Christina Leslie. These artists’ distinct practices examine the intertwined histories of the Black Atlantic through photography, installation, textiles, print, and mixed media. Curated by writer and artist francesca ekwuyasi, the exhibition concerns itself with how materials become repositories of memory, carrying histories of migration, labour, displacement, survival, liberation, and creativity across the Black Atlantic. Through personal and collective archives, the artists reveal how ancestral knowledge continues to shape contemporary understandings of identity, place, and belonging.

The exhibition takes its title from two powerful materials. "Burnt sugar" evokes the histories of sugar production, enslavement, labour, and the movement of people and goods across the Atlantic. "Blue" references indigo, a dye whose own history is deeply connected to global trade, colonial economies, cultural knowledge, and resistance. Together, these materials become points of departure for artistic practices that reflect on histories of extraction while imagining new forms of connection, care, repair, and liberation. Rather than presenting a singular historical narrative, Burnt Sugar Blue considers the archive as something living and continually reimagined, transforming inherited histories into spaces of resilience, remembrance, and creative possibility.

About the Exhibitions

Presented concurrently, Burnt Sugar Blue and Roger Mooking: SoundBites explore how contemporary artists activate histories and forms of cultural memory that extend beyond conventional archives. Through material culture, sound, storytelling, image, and installation, both exhibitions consider how memory is continually reconstructed through artistic practice, creating new forms of belonging, resilience, and collective imagination across generations and geographies.

The exhibitions are accompanied by Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023), a collaborative publication by Roger Mooking and francesca ekwuyasi. Richly illustrated and interdisciplinary in form, the book brings together essays, conversations, photography, visual art, music, lyrics, and micro-stories in a meditation on creativity, Blackness, family, grief, storytelling, and the rhythms of everyday life, inviting readers to reflect on how artistic practice helps us make meaning from memory, loss, and lived experience.

Curious Sounds also serves as a conceptual bridge between the two projects, creating an interdisciplinary dialogue that moves fluidly between visual art, literature, music, and conversation, offering audiences multiple ways to engage ideas around cultural memory and

contemporary creative practice and embodied forms of knowledge. The publication will be available for purchase in the Gallery throughout the exhibition.