A brand new present at Autograph examines the facility and legacy of collage as a artistic act

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies invitations new views on social histories by mixed-media picture making, finds Phin Jennings

Sabrina Tirvengadum, a British Mauritian photographer, has seen only a few pictures of her household historical past from earlier than 1960. She knew that, within the nineteenth century, her Mauritian ancestors had been indentured labourers working for a rich household of sugar plantation homeowners, however was not sure of what their lives seemed like. Working from a handful of images and her personal creativeness, she began experimenting with an AI mannequin to create pictures of her household’s hidden historical past. A collection of those pictures is at present on present at Autograph as a part of I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies, a bunch exhibition curated by Bindi Vora, which opened 10 October, 2025. “It blends my own memories, what’s real and what I imagine. It mixes together pasts and reimagines history,” Tirvengadum tells me.

In every body, contexts and figures mix collectively in unusual methods, giving the impression of a vaguely-remembered dream. Happy Birthday to You (2025) reveals a smartly-dressed household of 11 gathered round a desk in the midst of a forest; in Pose for our Family (2025), a younger girl grasps a teddy bear with no legs. Tirvengadum likes to maintain the discontinuities and hallucinations that the AI mannequin concocts, as a result of they mirror the glitches in her personal understanding of the previous: “Something’s always not quite right, and histories are distorted in a way as well.”

Across the work of the 13 artists on this exhibition – pictures, portray, textiles, video and extra introduced collectively underneath an expanded understanding of collage – the questioning and augmenting of the historic canon and official archives is a operating theme. Each artist cuts, sticks and edits pictures to seize numerous undocumented histories which are generally private, generally political, and infrequently each.