In a powerful intervention at the Royal Geographical Society, Ann Gollifer reframes colonial narratives through watercolour, memory, and ancestral reflection.
Ann Gollifer, Hosororo Hill, 2016. Topographical watercolour on 300gsm Arches paper. Framed size: 1010 x 720mm. Courtesy of the artist and Guns & Rain Gallery.
This summer and until August 31, 2025, paintings and lithographs by the Botswana-based artist Ann Gollifer will be exhibited in the Director’s Gallery at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
‘Views in the Interior of Guiana 1841’, in dialogue with Robert Schomburgk, is a collection of watercolour views brought together in a spellbinding book of memories and places, textures and panoramas that result from a nine-year project. Gollifer explains to me, “The project that began in 2012 and was completed in 2021 is a dialogue with the Schomburgk book published in 1841, so a dialogue across 180 years! [It is]… between a male, Colonial, British German explorer-geographer and a woman, British Guyanese, Warao/Arawak, visual artist finding her way home.”
Views in the Interior of Guiana by Ann Gollifer. Courtesy of Guns & Rain Gallery.
The artist’s book is an exploration of Amerindian Gollifer’s Warao-Arawak tribal roots. Her works reframe the narrative of earlier colonial interpretations, such as the geographical, ethnological and botanical studies of South America and the West Indies, offered by 19th-century British explorer Sir Robert Schomburgk.
“What a trip it has been for me to stage an intervention of this personal body of work into the heart of what was the essence of British Colonial establishment, The Royal Geographical Society,” says Gollifer. She smiles, “The meaning of my work could not have been more enhanced by any other environment.”
Sophie Kazan Makhlouf PhD is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Museum Studies at Leicester University. She is an Associate Professor adjunct at the University of Notre Dame (USA) In London and an Associate Lecturer at the University of Falmouth, in the department of Architecture. Sophie’s research and focus has been on art and culture from countries in the Global South. She writes for various art magazines and journals in the UK and the Middle
East. Her book The Development of An Art History in the UAE: An Art Not Made To Be Understood was published by Anthem Press in 2024. She is a member of the Association for Art History and hosts 60 second Art Minute documentaries on Youtube, to promote accessibility and education in the visual arts.
