From the Deep: an underwater kingdom for enslaved people who died in the Atlantic
“Yeah, I think we got it,” Ayana V Jackson, wearing a black coat and crouching on a circular seat, says with quiet satisfaction into a phone that connects her to a sound engineer.
The artist is putting the finishing touches to an immersive video installation in which Jackson herself – wearing body paint and otherworldly costumes – can be seen swimming amid coral, fish and shipwrecks. Her deep dive is accompanied by the call of whales, sonic pulses and an ethereal singing from what could be mermaids.
It is the centrepiece of From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya, an exhibition now open at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington.
The show is inspired by , an imaginary underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant women who, considered “sick cargo” by transatlantic slave traders, were thrown overboard or jumped to their deaths
