Hope Strickland

2023 | Emerging Prize Winner

Hope Strickland’s piece was filmed in archives and museums across the UK. I’ll Be Back looks at a series of collections that hold objects of colonial violence. It examines institutional practices and reconsiders the distance between myth, history and systemic power. Amongst these is a book containing a diagram of a slave ship, a key document in the abolitionist movement widely published for its shocking nature, and a collection of insects gathered in Sierra Leone by a colonial topographer mapping borders and defining British and French territory in West Africa. Shifting across digital, 16mm and archival formats, the film interrogates institutional collecting practices and reconsiders the distances between myth, history and machinations of power.

hopestrickland.com