Shiraz Bayjoo on the Afterlives of Print

“We didn’t think we were far away from anywhere,” says artist Shiraz Bayjoo about his childhood in Mauritius. The island, part of an archipelago stretching from East Africa and Madagascar, instilled a sense of proximity to the Creole and Maroon communities from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, who were displaced across the Indian Ocean’s plantation colonies as indentured labourers, starting in the 16th century.

Based between the UK and Mauritius, Bayjoo’s perspective is shaped by that inheritance. “We carry our ancestors’ traumas but also their strengths of survival, their instincts and knowledge,” the artist explains, and his multimodal practice—a matrix of installation, film, printmaking, textile, sculpture and painting—navigates that heritage with care.

Bayjoo’s research typically begins at the tender interface of community, conversation, and physical sites of collective memory and living histories: a process that often unfolds over years. “What was it like for them when they stood on this shoreline or this forest?” he asks. “What was it like for the Maroon who comes from East Africa, an open savannah, to suddenly find themselves in this tropical mangrove forest, running for their lives?”

These questions, which form the existential ethos of Bayjoo’s work, rarely correlate with a visual record, let alone first-person accounts. Instead, they inhabit pulsing gaps left by colonial erasure. As such, Bayjoo’s visual material is print-based, and often sourced from archives and collections, not to provide answers, but to act as material witness to what was lost or omitted. “Often, there is nothing in the archive,” he explains. Giving language to this palimpsest of experience, he has learned to “push even harder and look at even smaller pieces of these fragments.”

These fragments are core to Bayjoo’s compositions. Take Coral Island (2021–ongoing), a series of baroque frames made from Black Vulcan clay in reference to the volcanic stone of islands like Mauritius, contain decals based on sketches made by Dutch sailors and reinterpreted as lithographs by printers, under an uncanny green glaze. Or Botanical Shrines (2024), which features botanical drawings imprinted on wooden altar sculptures, combined with seed pods, jewellery and Giant African Snail shells. Assembling regional objects and colonial documents into coded compositions, these discreet portals echo classification systems found in museums, archives and botanical gardens.

Print has always been central to Bayjoo’s practice. Not only because of its use during the colonial era to disseminate colonial epistemologies, but also due to the discipline’s position between traditional making and industrialised mass production.

This interplay unfolds in Bayjoo’s suspended painting fabric and flag installations, where he often works with traditional craftspeople to transpose methods and materials. In the case of Pu Travers Sa Dilo (2023), Mauritian creole for ‘to cross this water’, two diamond-shaped Kanga fabrics give form to archival fragments by compositing images of Creole musicians, Swahili dhows, captured slave ships, and illustrations of early European expeditions along East Africa’s coast, with contemporary photographs of Maroon forests and the Indian Ocean.

The colonial re-ordering of nature, enshrined by European botanical gardens like Kew Gardens in London is, for the artist, the aesthetic culmination of multiple channels of colonial theft, expropriation and displacement. From the physical extraction of plant species to botanical drawings by colonial agents, a systematic practice that codified and grafted the European imaginary onto nature, these gardens “evolved with every diminishing moment of the indigenous forests they were extracted from,” says Bayjoo. In this system, where classifications born of indigenous knowledge and forced labour were absorbed into European authorship, the very concept of ‘nature’ was ordered into a separate, industrialised resource, epistemically severed from its symbiotic relationship with humanity.

The social and environmental effects of this colonial re-ordering frames the artist’s site-specific sea-facing installation, Sa Sime Lamer (2025), created for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Installed at Aspinwall House, a warehouse complex named after the British trading firm established in Fort Kochi in 1867, the work constellates Mauritius and the Malabar coast of India under Portuguese and Dutch colonial occupation by giving spatial form to the Tractado De Las Drogas, Y Medicinas De Las Indias Orientales, a 16th-century colonial compendium on medicinal plants of southern India by Portuguese doctor Cristóbal Acosta.

Suspended raw muslin panels with fraying tassels feature botanical drawings of plants and spices contained in the volume, which were extracted for European and Mauritian gardens. From these hang fragile terracotta seed sculptures, echoing the loss of indigenous species and local knowledge. Strewn on the floor are raw coconut husks, coir rope and wooden pillars based on the remaining structure of Kochi’s Dutch Garden, alongside ceramic figures of Dutch soldiers, recalling the invasion that unseated the Portuguese in 1663.

Bayjoo’s installations are rooted in rituals of remembering, since islands like Mauritius are defined not by human indigeneity, but by an ancestral lineage of endemic species that the plantations eradicated. “Many now exist only as drawings,” he says, or are maintained on “life support in the greenhouses of botanical gardens around the world.” In To Desir, Mo Lamor, Bayjoo’s 2025 exhibition with Copperfield in London, the artist created a multi-part memorial to the lost terrestrial species of the Indian Ocean’s plantation landscape. Arranged on plinths like relics were native plants cast in bronze during his residency at a Thai foundry, while dream-like canvases featuring botanical prints ensconced in luminous acrylic colour washes were draped with French lace, a fabric synonymous with colonial tables.

Bayjoo has made a conscious choice to increasingly show his work in the Global South, which aligns with a question that drives his practice: who is this for? “When it comes to every community I have connected with,” Bayjoo notes, “what has stayed with me is this indigenous underlining to our lives that remains no matter how much we have been displaced,” he continues. “We survived through love.”

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