Yassmin Forte
Regime, 2022
Manual Collage on Photo Digital Print, Ilford Fine Textured Silk 279gsm
29.7cm x 42cm
1 of 5
Series: This Is A Story About My Family
Certificate of Authentication
The series, This Is A Story About My Family received the Contemporary African Photography award in 2023. Forte's images attempt to dissect and navigate the effects of colonialism and migration...
The series, This Is A Story About My Family received the Contemporary African Photography award in 2023. Forte's images attempt to dissect and navigate the effects of colonialism and migration from her family's history using family archives and her own images to unpack her African identity. In this process, she investigates how Africans have become the result of mixtures, migrations and colonisation, their histories blended in the repetition of patterns. Her parents met and fell in love on a dance floor in Quelimane, Mozambique when he was stationed there at the height of the Portuguese occupation of Mozambique. He was part of the armed forces, and her mother was a local Mozambican woman. With independence in 1975, the Frelimo Party (The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) ordered the Portuguese to leave the country within 24 hours. But her father stayed. For the artist, collage exaggerates and emphasises this history, juxtaposing past and present to constructs a perception of her own identity.