Christopher Samuel: The Archive of An Unseen

Christopher Samuel is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience.

The Archive of An Unseen tells the story of the artist’s childhood, growing up as a black, disabled, working class child from a single parent household in the 1980s and 1990s.

Inside a custom built Microform reader, visitors can navigate photographs, medical documents, videos, audio clips and archival items, to build an honest narrative from fragments of memory.

A new audio work and series of prints, commissioned by Attenborough Arts Centre, will reflect more of the voices and stories the artist captured during the research phase of this project. The new works reveal the voices of more disabled people to explore the often hidden experience of growing up disabled in the UK – stories of segregation, marginalisation, and resilience.