African Objects: Psychoactives, Spirituality & Mental Health

Living Worlds Gallery, Manchester Museum

Join us at Manchester Museum for African Objects: Psychoactives, Spirituality & Mental Health, an event that showcases the culmination of a six-week project led by transdisciplinary lead artist Divine Southgate-Smith in collaboration with people from Black and African - Caribbean communities. Together they explored spirituality, mental health and recovery.

Curated by Southgate-Smith, the project’s lead artist, this event is a collaborative and poetic response to the project’s outcomes and objects chosen from Manchester Museum’s Living Cultures collection, exploring their psychological and societal implications within the African diaspora.

Contextual material and a sculptural time capsule made by Southgate-Smith will be displayed in juxtaposition to the Museum objects.

Inspired by parables and traditional griot storytelling, original poetry devised by project participants will be performed live and will be available in the form of a beautiful, limited edition artist book.

There will be a music performance from a Manchester-based Kora player and a collective discussion, reflecting on project themes between the lead artist and project collaborators, with an opportunity for audience interaction.

Rooted in experiences of recovery and mental health, this event offers new ways of understanding African objects and their contemporary cultural use – not as static relics, but as living tools for reflection and transformation.

An event for Portraits of Recovery’s Recoverist Month: Sept 2025 – placing lived experience at the heart of an annual, month-long arts programme that re-writes narratives on substance use and recovery.

About the artist

Divine Southgate-Smith (b. 1995, Lome, Togo) is a British trans-disciplinary artist. Her work often references and questions articulations of black, queer, and female experience. Her approach to artmaking is medium non-specific, allowing her to explore complex narratives through various media and disciplines.

Find out more here

Our generous funders

MYRIAD

MYRIAD supports the delivery of culturally competent, community-based mental health and wellbeing support for global majority communities. This project is part of MYRIAD Test & Learn within the Greater Manchester Creative Health Place Partnership.

Greater Manchester’s Creative Health Place Partnership is part of Live Well; GM’s movement for community-led health and well-being, supporting residents to live well, by creating community-led approaches with culture and creativity at their heart.

MYRIAD is supported by NHS GM Integrated Care and Baring Foundation. The GM Creative Health Place Partnership is further supported by Arts Council England.