Mark of Cane explores the impact of sugar on the African-Caribbean Diaspora, confronting the haunting legacies of the Industrial Revolution and the Transatlantic Slave trade.
Kat Anderson, winner of the first East London Art Prize. premieres ‘Las, Fiya’ (‘Last, Fire’), a fictional short film which uses the genre of Horror to explore the subjects of ancestral trauma, dispossession and the
power in the return/retrieval. The exhibition is an immersive, audiovisual experience, centred around the new fictional short film, and accompanied by new paperworks.
Shot largely on an existing sugarcane farm in Jamaica, the film weaves historical methods of harvesting sugarcane and sugar production with the cinematic concept of the ‘Origin Story’. The accompanying series of paperworks have been hand-made from the extracted by-products of sugarcane, produced as part of Anderson’s residency at East London Art Prize partner UCL East.
In line with Anderson’s larger project ‘Episodes of Horror’, Mark of Cane questions the emancipatory potential of creativity, reclamation and listening to history. Sugarcane becomes a vessel, both narratively and materially, for an imaginative and impactful examination of colonial histories. The work invites conversations around the forced and coerced movements of Black African-Caribbean people, from slavery through to the Windrush generation and its subsequent scandal.
Kat Anderson was the winner of the inaugural East London Art Prize in 2023. The winner of the prize presents the winner’s solo exhibition the following year. More on the East London Art Prize.
Anderson’s film has been supported by funds from Arts Council England and produced with support from Spike Island, Bristol.
