Art Basel Hong Kong’s new sector, Echoes, allows galleries to track reverberations across current practices, placing works from the last five years by up to three artists in dialogue. There’s one meaning of ‘echo’ though, as a lingering trace or vestige, which feels especially suited to several of the debut presentations, where artists from Australia to Zimbabwe, Vietnam to Colombia, are unearthing buried histories and making visible the legacies of colonialism.

Three leading voices from Australia explore inheritance, landscape, and cultural memory in Station gallery’s presentation, ‘Between Worlds, Within Lines’. Pedro Wonaeamirri’s Tutini poles are treelike sculptures decorated with delicate lines of dots painted with a wooden comb. Referencing designs used in ceremonial body painting and on bloodwood poles erected in traditional funerary rites, they speak to and extend the Indigenous customs transferred in a direct line by his elders to this Tiwi artist and cultural leader from Melville Island. Daniel Boyd, meanwhile, uses a similarly delicate overlay in his dot paintings. Here, imagery drawn from sources that include antique paintings, found photographs of Indigenous peoples, and places where the artist has ancestral ties, are covered with dots of glue. These create a constellation of lenses through which the image can be glimpsed, while the spaces between them form a dark ground. Boyd’s paintings ask us to consider what lies hidden both within these obscured intervening areas and, implicitly, from historical records. Interstices are also a feature of Tony Clark’s ‘myrioramas’, works composed of multiple painted panels inspired by a 19th-century European parlor game in which players had to reorder illustrated cards into different classical vistas. Like Boyd, Clark resists a singular, simple view, fragmenting his romantic landscapes of mountains and trees into grids.

At Max Estrella’s booth, works by Vietnamese-born Tiffany Chung and the Colombian artist Miler Lagos employ maps, books, and botanical studies to visualize the long-term implications of displacement on social geography and ecology. Chung’s large-scale embroidered map of the world traces the historic trajectories of the global spice trade in neatly stitched, overlapping threads. An extensive set of data informs this cartography, which charts the reverberations of the spice trade across time on commerce, migration, and culinary traditions. In the accompanying embroidered studies of corresponding spices, Chung’s beautiful specimens float, uprooted, on their linen grounds.

Lagos returns another form of material culture to its origins in tree sculptures made from stacks of repurposed books on botany, trade, and environmental history. Their spines are visible in cross-sections along the vertical core of each sculpture as if these composite trunks had been split neatly down the center by lightning. Around each trunk run concentric circles made by the books’ fore edges: a timeline of human endeavor tied to resource extraction.

In ‘Third World Democracy’, a joint gallery presentation from Nome and Catinca Tabacaru, artistic practices converge in the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement, founded in 1961 by developing nations determined to protect their independence, with a focus on shared struggle following the flowering of global decolonization movements in the mid-20th century. Cian Dayrit’s embroidered maps and diagrams featuring combinations of text, archival imagery, and symbols, illustrate the history and effects of colonization in his native Philippines and beyond. With a focus on land rights, these counter-cartographies subvert the power structures that are usually implicit in map-making. Often created in collaboration with networks of local and Indigenous communities, they center solidarity with those at the margins and on the ground. In his hybrid figures, Terrence Musekiwa meanwhile, fuses traditionally carved stone sculpture with found objects that speak to centuries-old customs and more recent sociopolitical contexts, including military oppression in Africa and beyond. Using stone mined in his home country of Zimbabwe, he draws on his Chikaranga ancestry and the carving techniques passed down to him by his sculptor father. Musekiwa’s carved heads are joined to a variety of found items, including cowrie shells, industrial flotsam, and artillery shells from the 1970s – a critical decade in Zimbabwe’s fight for independence.