Shiraz Bayjoo

Searching for Libertalia SHIRAZ BAYJOO, 2019 3 channel video Commissioned by New Art Exchange Screening here until June 3rd Libertalia was ‘a myth amongst pirates, their holy grail’, Shiraz Bayjoo explains. It was that heady rumour which gave its name to Daniel Defoe’s outlaw kingdom in his 1742 General History of the Pyrates – and the document’s slippery status of faux-chronicle which Bayjoo drew into his 2019 film work Searching for Libertalia. Defoe imagined Madagascar as Libertalia’s host island, and debate wages still as to the precise...