Mark of Cane

2024

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.

A solo exhibition by Kat Anderson, winner of the inaugural East London Art Prize. Anderson 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, audio-visual experience, centred around the new single-channel, 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 UCL East, where a special cane crusher and boiler furnace will be used to extract materials for the paper-making process.

In line with the 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.