MRes student, Elsa James, presented new works on paper from her Afro Dada series in the group exhibition How to be in the Future? at Chisenhale Art Place, London. The exhibition ran from 3 to 12 October 2025.
Afro Dada is a recent strand of James' practice that brings Afrocentric cultural forms and ideas into dialogue with the Dadaist strategies of play, disruption, and abstraction. It reflects on how the diasporic Black British identity is shaped, fractured, and reassembled through the histories of chattel enslavement and the legacies of the British Empire.
The concept first unfolded publicly during James' solo exhibition, It Should Not Be Forgotten (Firstsite, March–July 2025), where one of the galleries was transformed into a working artist's studio.
