The Broken Trade Winds
Installation and video works, 2022–2023
In The Broken Trade Winds, Mai Al Shazly explores the entangled legacies of empire, porcelain, and the transatlantic slave trade. Emerging from archival research and material culture, the project reflects on how Britain’s celebrated ceramics industry intersects with the brutal history of slavery and the African diaspora.
The project consists of four parts, The Diagram, Reanimating the archive, The Middle Passage and A history of excellence.
Featured in the exhibitions;
Collective exhibition_ OVERWHELMED at UJ Gallery, University Johannesburg 2023, curated by Eugene Hon and Ruth Sacks.
Collective exhibition_ TOTALITARIANPROPS The Africa Centre, curated by Najlaa Elageli and Tewa Barnosa.
Something Else at the Citadel, curated by Simon Njami and Moataz Nasr
The Diagram
19th century English blue and white ceramics fragments and mixed media. 200 × 130 × 15 cm.
This work uses fragments of English blue and white ceramics to form a mapped representation of transatlantic slave voyages. Stacked and layered, the shards highlight the export of British ceramics to Africa and its widespread appeal during the height of colonial trade.
Referencing domestic rituals and dining aesthetics, The Diagram critiques how imperial ideologies were embedded in everyday objects. The unrefined fragments become evidence of a system that enriched the Empire while exploiting millions.
Reanimating the Archive
Transfer print on ceramic plates
This wall installation uses ceramic dinner plates to depict contemporary immigrants at sea, reimagining the historical TRADE WINDS pattern—a design originally printed on white earthenware by Spode (England, c.1959) for the American market. The pattern once glorified merchant ships; here, it is recontextualized to confront histories of forced migration.
By placing these images on dining plates, the work transforms the dinner table—a symbol of community—into a site of memory and critique. The composition echoes the shape of migration routes across the Mediterranean, connecting past and present displacements.
Using traditional transfer printing, the piece highlights how repetition, reproduction, and domestic ritual continue to carry the traces of colonial violence and erasure.
The Middle Passage / A History of Excellence
Two-channel video installation (5:21 min & 2:57 min)
This two-part video installation explores the relationship between material culture and colonial history. A History of Excellence presents pristine British crockery as symbols of national pride, exposing how everyday objects reflect imperial ideologies embedded in domestic rituals.
The Middle Passage shifts focus to the vast oceanic space where countless enslaved Africans perished during transatlantic crossings. It draws a parallel between the commodification of people and goods, linking the polished surfaces of porcelain to histories of displacement and violence.
Together, the videos examine how beauty and brutality coexist within the legacy of empire.
-
-
-
-
Share