At Dalhousie Art Gallery, Burnt Sugar Blue and Roger Mooking’s SoundBites ask what happens when artists treat materials, images, music and memory not as evidence of a finished past, but as living archives.
By Kimberley Dooshima Jev
Sugar does not look like history when looking at it. It sits in bowls. It disappears into coffee. It is folded into recipes, packaged into snacks and stocked on grocery store shelves. Its presence is so ordinary that it is easy to forget the extraordinary systems that made it ordinary in the first place.
But sugar remembers.
For writer, artist and curator francesca ekwuyasi, following that memory means confronting a history in which sweetness was built through violence.
Her exhibition Burnt Sugar Blue, opening at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, begins from the relationship between sugar production, colonial economies and the enslavement of African people. It asks what happens when contemporary Black artists take materials with enormous historical weight and refuse to let that history remain invisible.
The exhibition brings together Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid and Christina Leslie across photography, textiles, installation, print and mixed media. It runs from September 11 through November 8 alongside Roger Mooking’s SoundBites.
For ekwuyasi, material is not decoration. It can be evidence. It can hold labour, migration, violence, knowledge, spirituality, survival and memory long after the people who first touched it are gone. Sugar is one such material.Indigo is another. Together, they give Burnt Sugar Blue its name.
SUGAR
The connection between sugar and the transatlantic slave trade is foundational to ekwuyasi’s curatorial research. European demand for sugar helped fuel plantation economies across the Caribbean. The production of sugar and other commodities including coffee and indigo depended on the forced labour of enslaved African people.
Over centuries, however, sugar’s violence became increasingly detached from sugar itself. The commodity survived.Its history became easier to overlook.
“Built on a global system of enslavement and labour exploitation, sugar has become a foodstuff that is ubiquitous in our daily lives,” ekwuyasi writes in her curatorial essay.
The distance between what we consume and what made that consumption possible is part of what interests her. Burnt Sugar Blue is not the first stage of the investigation.
With an earlier iteration, Burnt Sugar, opened at Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Toronto in 2024. It grew from the Ways of Attuning Curatorial Study Group and included work by Oluseye, Shaya Ishaq, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Bushra Junaid and Adama Delphine Fawundu.
Material was already central. Sugar. Indigo. Cassava. Hair. Soil. Cotton. Objects associated with Black life, commerce and cultural practice appeared not simply as things, but as entry points.
In Halifax, that conversation has continued to evolve. Christina Leslie’s Sugar Coat series makes the exhibition’s relationship to sugar particularly literal.
Leslie works with personal archives from Jamaica alongside contemporary and historical sugar advertisements, constructed photographs and appropriated pro-slavery texts. The series attempts to collapse the comfortable distance between the commodity and the conditions that produced it.
One of the works presented by Dalhousie, Hope and Present Chapter: Free, a pigment print made on sugar cane paper.
The material underneath the image therefore matters as much as the image. Sugar does not simply appear as a subject. Sugar is what holds the picture. There is something unsettling about that.
A material once tied to exploitation becomes the surface on which a contemporary Black artist can examine the stories that exploitation tried to obscure. The archive is no longer sitting behind glass. It is under the photograph.
Blue
Then the exhibition turns blue.
For this iteration of her curatorial research, ekwuyasi followed indigo. And indigo has led somewhere familiar. The intense blue pigment became a highly valuable commodity within global trade. West African communities already possessed deep knowledge of cultivating indigo plants and producing dye, knowledge that existed long before European colonial economies attempted to control and profit from it. As demand grew, enslaved African people were forced to labour within indigo production as the crop became another source of colonial wealth.
The deeper ekwuyasi went into that history, the harder the colour became to ignore. Its beauty and its violence began occupying the same space.
The curatorial essay ends with a deceptively simple admission:
“I see blue everywhere.”
Once history has been made visible, it at times becomes a problem you cannot unsee. You cannot easily make it invisible again. You cannot forget.
Stina Baudin’s Black Cartographies pushes that question beyond colour and into space. Baudin, a Haitian-Canadian artist and scholar, works across textiles, archival materials, data, sound and oral history. In Black Cartographies, she takes the graph, a tool we often associate with objective measurement and turns it into a way of thinking about Black history, objects, geography and selfhood.
Graphs are supposed to organize information. Baudin asks what else they might organize. What happens when mapping is not simply about locating a body on land, but locating a Black diasporic self within histories that cross oceans, borders and generations?
The answer is not necessarily a neat map.
That is part of the point.
The Black Atlantic is not one journey.
Neither is its archive.
Family enters the archive
Bushra Junaid’s Portraits in Time makes those distances intimate. Junaid is a Toronto-based artist, writer and curator of Jamaican and Nigerian heritage who was raised in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her work frequently uses archival fragments and family histories to restore complexity to Black lives that formal histories have left partial or obscured.
In Portraits in Time, she uses the format of the stereoview, placing images beside one another so that different moments begin to speak across time.
Archival photographs of Caribbean children working in cane fields meet a faded family photograph of children playing beside the ocean.
Images of Caribbean women and children among piles of cane are placed in conversation with archival photographs of people drying fish in Newfoundland.
Work.
Family.
Children.
Ocean.
Caribbean.
Atlantic Canada.
Past.
Present.
Placed together, those categories begin losing their clean borders.
ekwuyasi describes the viewer as being positioned between temporal, cultural and familial dimensions. That may be one of the most important ideas running through the exhibition.
An archive does not have to belong only to an institution. Sometimes it is a photograph somebody has kept. Sometimes it is knowledge carried through a family. Sometimes it is an image whose meaning changes because of the image placed beside it. Sometimes the archive has been speaking all along. We simply inherited a way of looking that taught us not to hear it.
The ocean does not belong only to trauma
Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work pushes the exhibition into another important territory. The Brooklyn-born artist, who is of Sierra Leonean and Equatorial Guinean heritage, works across photography, print, video and mixed media. Her practice is deeply interested in African diasporic history, spiritual knowledge and cultural continuity.
In ekwuyasi’s writing about Fawundu, the sea becomes particularly important. There is an understandable tendency, when discussing the Atlantic within Black diasporic history, to arrive at the Middle Passage and stop there.
Fawundu refuses that limitation.
In work engaging Mami Wata, the water spirit found across African and diasporic cultures, the sea is not allowed to exist only as the location of historical catastrophe.
The sea existed before colonialism.
It sustains life.
It moves people.
It carries spiritual meaning.
It can be dangerous and beautiful at once.
For Fawundu, reclaiming the ocean also means reclaiming the possibility of understanding Black life beyond the boundaries colonial history tried to impose upon it.
That thinking continues in Burnt Sugar Blue through The Remix and She Don’t Stop, a layered mixed-media work using processes and materials including cyanotypes, block prints, raffia, hair, film and photographic imagery, as well as the video triptych Deep Inside I’m Blue, which follows the travels of a Mende spirit through Africa and its diaspora.
This is where Burnt Sugar Blue avoids becoming an exhibition exclusively about what was done to Black people.
The history of exploitation is there.
It cannot not be there.
But so are dignity, refusal, spirituality, knowledge, family, imagination and survival.
Dalhousie describes the exhibition as moving from histories of extraction toward possibilities for connection, care, repair and liberation. Its archive is intentionally presented not as fixed history but as something living, something artists continue to remake.
That distinction matters.
Because remembering violence is not the same as allowing violence to become the only thing remembered.
Two exhibitions, one conversation
Across the Dalhousie Art Gallery, Roger Mooking is asking another version of the same question.
SoundBites, his first solo exhibition in Atlantic Canada, moves through visual art, moving image, text and music. Inspired by the sampling traditions of Hip-Hop, Mooking takes pieces of his own creative life and places them into new relationships.
The exhibition is structured through three movements: The Learning, The Living and The Leaving.
A life becomes material.
Memory gets sampled.
The self becomes an archive.
Burnt Sugar Blue and SoundBites are being presented concurrently, but their relationship is not accidental. Dalhousie positions the exhibitions as investigations into forms of cultural memory that stretch beyond conventional archives.
For Mooking, the archive begins close to the body. Near the end of a conversation with Afros in tha City, he was asked whether self-archiving today might be understood as an act of freedom or survival.
His answer moved somewhere slightly different. “I think it’s trying to understand ourselves and how we maneuver in the world,” he said.
Historical context, he continued, gives us meaning and purpose while offering a framework for how we might move forward.
That idea travels easily across the gallery because the archive inside Burnt Sugar Blue is also trying to understand how we arrived here.
It lives inside a family photograph.
Inside sugar cane paper.
Inside raffia and hair.
Inside a graph.
Inside the ocean.
Inside a colour.
Inside things that appear ordinary until someone teaches us how to look again.
There may be something resonant about asking these questions in Kjipuktuk/Halifax.
Dalhousie Art Gallery sits in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq, in a province where African Nova Scotian communities have histories stretching back more than four centuries.
Here, the Atlantic is not an abstract curatorial idea.
It is outside.
It is geography.
It is movement.
It is arrival and removal, trade and migration, memory and home.
Burnt Sugar Blue does not offer one clean history of that world.
It would be strange if it did.
Instead, its artists pull at different threads and allow the connections, ruptures and contradictions to remain visible.
Perhaps that is what a living archive requires.
Not simply preserving what happened, but returning to it.
Questioning it.
Putting one image beside another.
Turning an old material over in our hands.
Asking who made it.
Asking who profited.
Asking what knowledge survived anyway.
And recognizing that history does not disappear simply because we stop noticing it.
Sometimes it is sitting on the table.
Sometimes it is in the family album.
And sometimes, after looking closely enough, you begin to see blue everywhere.
Exhibition Information
Burnt Sugar Blue, curated by francesca ekwuyasi, and Roger Mooking: SoundBites are on view at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax from September 11 to November 8, 2026. Admission is free. The gallery is located on the lower level of the Dalhousie Arts Centre at 6101 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Gallery hours are Wednesday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
For exhibition details, programming, accessibility and visitor information, visit artgallery.dal.ca.