Sunlight on the Seafloor

Sunlight on the Sea Floor considers how artists engage the overlapping legacies of colonialism, militarization, migration, and displacement across island geographies and their diasporas. Featuring twelve international artists, the exhibition reflects on how creative practices can reclaim memory, archive the unseen, and illuminate histories that have been submerged or systematically erased. The exhibition begins with the work of Chagosian artist Clément Siatous, whose vivid, detailed paintings depict the forced displacement of his community from the Chagos Islands in the 1970s to make way for a U.S. military base. His renderings offer a counter-history - one shaped by radical imagination, remembrance, and the desire to preserve collective memory against the weight of imperial narratives. Siatous's practice sets a tone for the exhibition, resonating with artists from Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Mauritius, Panamá, Puerto Rico, and their diasporas, who similarly trace post-plantation landscapes, diasporic memory, and acts of cultural survival across the Indian Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Taking its title from Derek Walcott's poem The Sea Is History, Sunlight on the Sea Floor explores how visual art can operate as an archive - one that brings to light the political, spiritual, and emotional depths of displacement and resilience. Through video, photography, installation, print, and painting, these artists confront the legacies of empire while imagining new ways of being, belonging, and remembering. Sunlight on the Sea Floor is a traveling exhibition curated by Paula Naughton and Marina Reyes Franco (Curator, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico). It is produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC).Sunlight on the Sea Floor is made possible withthe generous support of ICI's Board of Trustees and International Forum.