Vamona Navelcar (1929–2021): Art of an Oceanic Life

Using a series of works created in multiple oceanic locations and from across his lifetime, this visual essay highlights how the politics of post/colonialism affected the existence and oeuvre of artist Vamona Navelcar (1929–2021). Born in Goa, educated in Portugal, and employed in Mozambique, Navelcar's trajectory across these disparate regions was informed by coloniality and its afterlife. As a result, his art is inflected by his multiple displacements and exiles, highlighting a lusophonic and Afro-Asiatic heritage. Navelcar's legacy verges on disappearance at a time when the Indian Ocean world demonstrates far less fluidity, especially due to the rise of nationalism; yet the artist's works chronicle a world as it once was and that may even provide direction for the future.