"The Queen and the Black-Eyed Squint series of films are part of an ongoing line of artistic enquiry that began with the death of my grandmother in Ghana in 2016. Dina Kwansema Edwin Baiden, affectionately known as Aba, lived for 102 years and died singing praises to the lord for her life. She was born in what was known as the Gold Coast, during British Colonial rule. She lived through many political changes including the fight for independence which began in 1948, independence in 1957 and the subsequent instability of several coups from 1966- until the mid 80’s. All the while my grandmother brought up her family, baked bread, walked to church and much more. Being a child of migrant parents who had come to the United Kingdom after the coup in 1966, I knew very little of my grandmother."

On 4th March 1957 Monica Amekoafia was crowned the first Miss Ghana. Her prize was a visit to London, which was filmed in a Pathé newsreel.

In 1967, Barby's mother was captured in a photo with two other women. The photo, taken in a West African Student Union space in London, sees the women posing in front of a map of the world.

In 1977 Ama Ata Aidoo's debut novel Our Sister Killjoy was published. Also known as Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint, Aidoo’s novel follows the story of Sissie, a young educated Ghanaian woman, who goes to Europe to ‘better’ herself and describes what she sees.

In these films, Barby takes on the roles of her mother, Sissie and the beauty queen and visits various sites including sites in Newcastle, North Kensington in London, and Glasgow. We also visit her dreams of the possibility of an independent Ghana.

Presented as a life-sized photographic print and a series of video works, the films play with time, space and place, moving us between the post-colonial dreams of an independent country to the women's real-life stories, using the sites and places the Queen visits as to explore hidden histories, cultural memory, the legacies of colonialism and the interconnections between the places she visits and the former colonies.

All films are stand-alone pieces, however, the Glasgow films, The Arrival, The Tour and the Dream can be viewed as a trilogy. The films have been shown in Starless Midnight, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead, (2017), Get Up Stand Up Now, Somerset House, London (2019), ‘Revisiting the Work of Black Artists in Scotland through New Collecting’, GOMA, Glasgow (2022), On-doing Undoing, Ecological Futurisms, Ambika P3, London (2023) and in screenings at Regent Street Cinema, London (2018 & 2023) and The Library of Africa and the African Diaspora, Accra, Ghana (2023)

• Asante, Barby. 2022. The Queen and the Black-Eyed Squint Glasgow. In: "Revisiting the work of Black Artists in Scotland through New Collecting", Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, United Kingdom, 12 March - 3 July 2022. [Show/Exhibition]
• Asante, Barby. 2017. The Queen and the Black-Eyed Squint North Kensington. In: "Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers", Somerset House, London, United Kingdom, 12 June – 15 September 2019. [Show/Exhibition]

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35222