I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies – Autograph, London

A quick visit to Autograph for I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies turned into a wander through photography, textiles, video and family archives.

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies

I’ve always liked collage. It allows different histories, textures, and viewpoints to sit side by side. It resists being forced into neat alignment. That feels like a useful way into I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies, a group exhibition that brings together photography, video, textiles and digital work to think about identity, memory, complex history and social reality.

As with my previous visit to Autograph, the exhibition shows off what the gallery does best: presenting politically engaged art, rooted in photography, by artists from the global majority, without compromising on quality. The show moves between personal archives and broader histories (migration, colonialism, family inheritance) and lets the audience draw connections between artists and works.

I found myself more drawn to the mechanically produced works than the AI-based ones, though I appreciated the attempt to use AI as something other than spectacle. Sabrina Tirvengadum’s project, which uses generative imagery to fill gaps in her family album, is a good example: speculative by necessity, but prompted (haha, AI joke) by something real and unresolved.

Overall, it’s a varied exhibition, with plenty of depth. Not everything lands with equal weight, or at least it didn’t for me, but that perhaps appropriate for a show built around fragmentation. Either way, what a great free resource to have in London.

A Variety of Techniques in Dialogue

The strongest works here, for me, are those rooted in lived experience and material process. There’s a thoughtful new commission from Henna Nadeem, looking at tourism through the shadow of imperialism. Positioned near the entrance, it is worth taking a moment to absorb. Elsewhere, rediscovering Sunil Gupta is always a pleasure. His work appears periodically in my viewing life, and here he returns to familiar territory: queer identity, race, migration. His works that touch on the AIDS crisis and his own HIV diagnosis are particularly powerful.

I was also taken with the intimate woven pieces from the series A Veil of Memories by Arpita Akhanda, which reference the 1947 Partition of British India, and the multimedia works by Sim Chi Yin, where personal history bends time and space. Qualeasha Wood’s tapestries ruminate on rest and the commodification of our bodies in the digital age. Meanwhile, an impressive composite wall by Ethiopian artist Wendimagegn Belete builds meaning through accumulation. There are brief panels accompanying each artist’s contributions, but nothing is overexplained: the works are allowed to speak for themselves.

Borders and Belonging

Questions of borders and belonging are recurring themes throughout the exhibition. Reena Saini Kallat’s piece on the passport index (the relative power of different nationalities in terms of visa-free travel) turns bureaucracy into something a bit more poetic. And there’s a really strong video work by Brook Andrew (of Wiradjuri, Ngunawal and Celtic heritage) that’s worth watching all the way through if you have time. It looks at archives as contested sites, critiquing institutional power.

What I liked most is that the show doesn’t try to resolve its contradictions. These are works shaped by race, sexuality, migration and inheritance, but also by curiosity and experimentation. Some pieces feel more successful than others, but taken together they offer a generous range of perspectives.

I dropped in with the Urban Geographer before heading next door for a very East London afternoon of immersive group games. It was an oddly satisfying pairing. Autograph continues to be one of those places where you can spend an hour, see thought-provoking work, and leave with your head full of art and ideas. Which feels about right.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies on until 21 March 2026