Silence in the Dream of a Language That Cannot Hold Us

A newly commissioned work by Bindi Vora for Chapter, Ffotogallery and Ffoto Cymru 2026. About 1972 marks both a political rupture and a threshold within Vora’s family history. Around 90,000 South Asians were forced to leave Uganda, and it is from within this history that this new commission takes shape. At its centre is a press photograph first published in the East African Standard that year, showing a South Asian woman being directed towards a bus by Ugandan army officers. Enlarged across the work, gestures of pointing, directing and control become part of its visual structure. Circular images cut across the newspaper photograph, bringing material made and held within South Asian lives into direct contact with an image produced for public circulation. In doing so, the work brings the scale of displacement into relation with family life and social histories. What emerges is not an attempt to complete the historical record, but to unsettle its terms. Images held privately or at the edges of public history become active agents in the production of history. Images surface and recede, moving between visibility and obscurity while resisting a single account of what happened and what followed. Installed within our café bar – a social and transitional space where people gather, pause and pass through – the work returns these images to a shared public space, asking what becomes visible in the aftermath of displacement Read more Toggle Installation