Public Preview
Saturday 3rd October
12 - 1pm
Bindi Vora: Silence in the Dream of a Language That Cannot Hold Us
Silence in the Dream of a Language That Cannot Hold Us is a newly commissioned work by Bindi Vora for Chapter Arts Center, Ffotogallery and Ffoto Cymru 2026.
1972 marks both a political rupture and a threshold within Vora’s family history. Around 90,000 South Asians were forced to leave Uganda, and it is from within this history that this new commission takes shape. At its centre is a press photograph first published in the East African Standard that year, showing a South Asian woman being directed towards a bus by Ugandan army officers. Enlarged across the work, gestures of pointing, directing and control become part of its visual structure.
Circular images cut across the newspaper photograph, bringing material made and held within South Asian lives into direct contact with an image produced for public circulation. In doing so, the work brings the scale of displacement into relation with family life and social histories.
What emerges is not an attempt to complete the historical record, but to unsettle its terms. Images held privately or at the edges of public history become active agents in the production of history. Images surface and recede, moving between visibility and obscurity while resisting a single account of what happened and what followed.
Installed within Chapter’s Caffi Bar – a social and transitional space where people gather, pause and pass through – the work returns these images to a shared public space, asking what becomes visible in the aftermath of displacement.
About the Artist:
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Bindi Vora is a London-based interdisciplinary artist and curator of Kenyan Indian heritage. Through photography, collage and archival materials, her practice explores postcolonial histories through personal and found images, creating layered works that examine diaspora and reinterpretation. Layering and repetition become building blocks for what remains when fragments of histories are co-opted, erased or interrupted and are shaped into portals - sites for imagined encounters with her ancestors, their stories and forms of resilience they leave behind.
Chapter Caffi Bar
Chapter Arts Centre
Market Rd
Cardiff
CF5 1QE
Opening Hours
Monday –Wednesday, Sunday
9:00am – 7:00pm
Thursday - Saturday
9:00am – 8:00pm
Open until 3rd January 2027