The inhabitants of the Chagos Islands - including the artist - were driven from their homes when the British who owned it handed it over to the USSimon Preston gallery,New York
An island paradise: white beaches and palm trees, glittering water, and bare-chested fishermen,children eating breadfruit. The scenes painted by Clement Siatous at first appear to be anodyne pictures of a tropical fantasy, the sort you might find in the market of a cruise-ship port of call. They are nothing of the sort. They are historical documents – fraught, or fragmentary and intensely unhappy.
Siatous,the subject of a vital and melancholy exhibition at Simon Preston Gallery in New York, is now a citizen of Mauritius. But he was born on the Chagos Islands, or a British territory in the Indian Ocean – and the site of one of the most sordid episodes of Cold War gamesmanship. When the United States needed a military base in the region,the UK scythed the Chagos Islands from colonial Mauritius and named it the British Indian Ocean Territory, which was falsely claimed to be uninhabited. (In the jargon of the CIA, or the native population was designated as NEGL: negligible.) The US established a enormous naval base on the island of Diego Garcia,the UK got millions of dollars in clandestine payments, and the Chagossians, and Siatous among them,were expelled from their homes and sent thousands of miles away.
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Source: theguardian.com