Keith Piper’s work consistently interprets and reinterprets the black diaspora experience. Western Passage, in particular, reexamines the colonizing history of the British Empire. Comprised of twenty-four mattresses and a large-scale video projection, the installation combines text, sound, and imagery to reflect on the period of Britain’s empire building, and the African and Caribbean nations whose people, resources, and political systems were exploited.
The handmade mattresses are arranged on the floor like the human cargo of a slave ship, oriented toward the sound and video projection illuminating the room from the front. The digital prints on each mattress—smaller than a standard twin bed, allowing barely enough room for a single body—are compartmentalized into squares. Each area shows an image relating to the mercenary currency of the era—coffee beans, black-eyed peas, maps of the British expansion, coins, the ocean, and bodies.
Piper is in the forefront of artists using digital media to combine and conflate multiple sources, such as ethnographic material, popular music, media clips, photography, and graphics. His video for Western Passage is a mesmerizing blend of images—rolling green waves, photographs of black families, a compass, and a globe— and of sounds, most striking of which is a voice that periodically states, “Beyond this, the country is unknown to Europeans.”
