Divine Southgate-Smith
Fractured self
Imagine yourself as a mosaic - each shard a memory, each fragment a story. Identity is fragmented, nonlinear, imperfect. Through collage, artists reassemble past and present into visual diaries, embracing the messiness of memory to reveal a self that is ever-evolving, resilient, and beautifully incomplete.
View SeriesDivine Southgate-Smith
Born in Lomé, Togo and based in London, Divine Southgate-Smith creates boundaryless, multidisciplinary work that explores Black, queer, and feminine experiences through speculative storytelling. Working across photography, sculpture, performance, and video, their practice reimagines the archive as a living, shape-shifting entity—one where identity, memory, and history are constantly rewritten.
Southgate-Smith interrogates representation through abstraction, layering, and recontextualization, challenging fixed narratives and opening space for joy, resistance, and transformation. Their work invites us into a fluid realm where becoming is both the method and the message—a continuous act of redefinition and imagination.
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"I’m interested in the spaces where language fails—where silence holds more truth than speech. The archive isn’t just a collection of what’s remembered; it’s a reflection of what’s been deliberately left out. My work tries to inhabit that gap, to give shape to what’s been silenced, and to let the unspoken speak."
- Divine Southgate-Smith
Exhibition: Navigator, 2025
Solo show at Nicoletti, London. Navigator is an exhibition about the movement of history, memory & ideas across time.
Limbo, 2023
In "Limbo," Divine Southgate-Smith expands on the tensions of "Show my teeth; I say nothing (i), delving into the unsettling space between clarity and ambiguity. Layers of abstraction blur the line between past and future, while the work’s dark, reflective tones suggest a liminal state—a place where identities are questioned and narratives collide.
Through this haunting piece, Southgate-Smith continues to challenge dominant representations, inviting viewers to linger in the uncertainty and imagine what lies beyond.
Show My Teeth; I Say Nothing (i), 2024
In Show my teeth; I say nothing (i), Divine Southgate-Smith creates a visual confrontation that speaks beyond words. Two images sit side by side: a muted, pastoral scene and an archival photograph of Black faces, solemn and close. The tension between these panels evokes the space between two realities—one romanticized, one raw—each demanding recognition on its own terms.
Framed in sleek black aluminum and printed on delicate Hahnemühle rice paper, the work balances fragility and strength. The title references the gesture of "kissing your teeth"—a wordless expression rooted in Black cultural communication, signaling resistance, frustration, and refusal. This gesture becomes a lens for interpreting the work’s layered interrogation of personal, historical, and cultural narratives.
The left panel's idealized village recalls colonial imagery that flattened African life into stereotype. The right panel resists, its monochromatic faces confronting the viewer with histories often erased. Their presence is undeniable, calling attention to what is seen and what is silenced, who tells the story and who bears its weight.
As in much of Southgate-Smith’s work, this diptych unsettles the link between sight and understanding. Drawing from archives and speculative aesthetics, the artist challenges passive viewing. The artwork becomes a site of reclamation, where silence and voice press against each other in unresolved tension.
Show my teeth; I say nothing (i) asks not just to be seen but to be listened to. It demands reflection and reckoning—with representation, erasure, and the power embedded in both. In this charged space, identity and history are no longer fixed but contested, layered, and alive.
“I'm always exploring the spaces between imagination, history & materiality. Materials carry memory, the way I work with them, whether through ink on paper, UV sublimation on glass or sculptural forms. It’s a way of collapsing time. Layering different technologies, different histories. (…) My process is about how a material holds a story.”
- Divine Southgate-Smith
Exhibition: Teethkissin', 2023
Soup presents the gallery’s second exhibition, Divine Southgate-Smith’s debut solo TEETH KISSIN’.
Teethkissin', Where Elephants Reside, 2023
A sequence of collages integrated with spoken word poetry.
“Imagine an infinite tunnel where all of time is compressed. You can choose one fragment, or one string, that might take you into the past or a vision of the future. (...) It felt important to give this abstract information a form. (...) In doing that, we're reminded of our responsibility to remember."
- Divine Southgate-Smith
Divine Southgate-Smith's Studio
"Divine Southgate-Smith on the Imaginative Work of Remembering" - Elephant Magazine
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