Martin Osman
Martin Osman
Martin Osman, Free Abel!, 2025, audio, film, installation, 20 mins. Photography by Tessa Hallman.
Gwynedd May Hudson, Portrait of an enslaved man, oil on canvas, Beecroft Art Collection. Photography by Tessa Hallmann.
Speculative fiction on an alternative view of how this painting may have come to be. Told from the perspective of the painting’s subject and influenced by the painter’s past of illustrating Alice in Wonderland.
Listen to the sound work by clicking here.
Free Abel was born out of a question.
When Majik inquired whether the gallery had any works by Black artists, they were told the collection included just one piece by Elsa James and two paintings of people of colour created by white artists. One of those paintings, The Enslaved Man, was created by a white woman who also illustrated Alice in Wonderland. This paradox — a white artist’s portrayal of a Black subject — made me question the assumptions tied to this artwork. The portrayal of Abel as a slave painted by a white woman in a position of power has long been taken as fact, but what if that narrative was wrong?
The painting, now in storage and deteriorating from neglect, represents something larger: a metaphor for how Black artists have been historically disregarded. The work’s degradation is a quiet, painful reflection of systemic erasure. What if we flipped the narrative and saw Abel not as a passive victim, but as a patron — someone giving the white artist an opportunity, a chance in a patriarchal world that would otherwise deny her? What if Abel understood that he was the one who could offer her a breakthrough?
These questions fuel Free Abel — a speculative, revisionist reimagining based on the title of the painting. The accompanying soundscape weaves in jazz records from the 1920s, a nod to the cultural landscape of Black Americans, juxtaposed with the curious absence of Black artists in the gallery’s collection. The music calls out, echoing the vitality of Black creativity often overlooked in the white-dominated art world. Additionally, the soundscape for the film draws on the journey Abel might have taken, simulating his movement from Ethiopia to England, with influences from the Azmari musicians of Ethiopia and even a playful rendition of the Ethiopian national anthem.
Free Abel! is an invitation to reconsider history, question assumptions, and reframe the stories we’ve been told.
Biography
My name is Martin Osman A.K.A dot.i and I work with sound.
In 2014 I stumbled into oral history through recording the stories of Senegalese soldiers that fought for France during WW2. While traveling around Senegal I began making field recordings of everything and anything, these recordings became music in a way that was different to my usual releases.
I released my first record in 2009 with a group called Obba Supa, releasing over 40 solo and collaborative projects in physical and digital kforms since then. I am now more focused on using sound and sonics in different ways and for different reasons. I work as an artist/producer, often on project commissions, often collaborating with researchers or other artists, such as the Secret Life of Ponds (UCL & Norfolk Ponds Project) and recording the sounds of compost for Waltham Forest Windrush 75 and William Morris Gallery.
I like to work with a narrative, voice and with D.I.Y instrumental sounds. Everything I have worked on continues to add to my ‘sound bank’ that contains site specific segments alongside folio and other collections, developing banks of field recordings that I use untouched or heavily manipulated.