It became really important to me to think about how we can put a Black presence into this space without depicting Blackness in a derogatory way. I wanted to find a way to honour those untold stories, names and histories that we can't uncover because the details have been lost or the books were never written. That was all challenging, to look back at slavery and the links to this building, the family and the city and then to decide that in fact I'm not going to depict all that; that what I create will still be rooted in the research but it might not be the thing that everybody expects.

— Sumuyya Khader