Attenborough Arts Centre Presents: ‘The Archive of An Unseen’ by Christopher Samuel

Christopher Samuel: The Archive of An Unseen

5 May – 16 July 2023, Gallery 2

Attenborough Arts Centre is proud to announce our newest exhibition, ‘The Archive of An Unseen’ by multi-disciplinary artist Christopher Samuel. His practice is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience.

The Archive of An Unseen tells the story of the artist's childhood, growing up as a black, disabled, working class child from a single parent household in the 1980s and 1990s. Visitors will enter the gallery to discover a custom-built Microform reader, an interactable piece used to navigate through photographs, medical documents, videos, audio clips and archival items, to build an honest narrative from fragments of memory.

A new audio work and series of prints, commissioned by Attenborough Arts Centre, will reflect more of the voices and stories the artist captured during the research phase of this project. The new works reveal the voices of more disabled people to explore the often hidden experience of growing up disabled in the UK - stories of segregation, marginalisation, and resilience. Seeking to interrogate his personal understanding of identity as a disabled person impacted by inequality and marginalisation, Christopher responds with urgency, humour, and poetic subversiveness within his work.

This exhibition is Christopher’s return to Attenborough Arts Centre, as he previously showcased his work titled ‘Housing Crisis’ in 2018. The screen-printed work aimed to raise awareness of the laws surrounding independent housing for disabled people, as cutbacks to benefit programs that would have given financial support to people with disabilities who cannot work or provide for themselves financially were happening and have continued.

Christopher has also worked with Attenborough Arts Centre through the Creative Engagement Fellowship Scheme that ended in February 2023. Through funding from the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF), he collaborated with the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries and the National Trust to co-create a film that explored previously untold histories of disability from across Trust sites and collections.

‘The Archive of An Unseen’ was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection and by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from Arts Council England.