Artist Clement Siatous was born on the Chagos Islands. He spent most of his childhood on the island of Diego Garcia until the entire population were forcibly evicted by the British Government to make way for a US naval base in 1973.

The UK Government was responsible for creating a fiction that a permanent population never existed. This claim was made easier to uphold due to sparse photographic documentation that until recently mainly existed in dispersed military and government archives.

Working with acrylic on canvas, Siatous renders a counterpoint to official and traditional modes of record. He creates sequential canvases that draw from memory, photography and film. Through his practice he reclaims ownership of his own history, while becoming a voice for his community in defying their culture’s eradication.