Friday, December 30, 2016

Ayesha Hameed: Black Atlantis/A Rough History

Monday 2 January, 2017, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard


 Still from A Rough History

Artist and writer Ayesha Hameed has been in residence at Alice Yard in late December. On January 2, 2017, she will present a series of works in sound and film. Hameed’s work explores contemporary borders and migration, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. She will be showing parts of two ongoing projects. Some of this will be a response to the space of Alice Yard and her first trip to Trinidad.

Black Atlantis is an audio-visual essay that looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in illegal migration at sea today, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space. Black Atlantis combines two discourses: Afrofuturism and the anthropocene. While in Trinidad, Hameed has been researching a new chapter of Black Atlantis exploring the relationship between plantation economies and the anthropocene.

A Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints) is a 16-mm film that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by in the Eurodac system, alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures. It looks at the coalescence of skin and data in the collection and destruction of fingerprints, at the life and circulation of the image of the fingerprint, and the different lives of the bodies that produce such images.

All are invited.


Still from A Rough History

About the artist: Ayesha Hameed’s recent presentations and performance lectures include Black Atlantis at ICA London (2015), Labour in a Single Shot at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015), at The Chimurenga Library at the Showroom, London (2015), Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, Oxford (2015), Edinburgh College of Art (2015), Goldsmiths MFA Lectures (2016), and Empire Remains (2016). A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) has been screened or presented at Forensic Architecture at the House of World Cultures (Berlin) in 2014, at Social Glitch at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich Vienna (2015), at Pavillion, Leeds in 2015, at Qalandiya International Palestine Biennial (2016), at Ashakal Alwan/Homeworks Space Programme, Beirut (2016) and the Bartlett School of Architecture (2016). She is currently the Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Send Love inna Barrel, Kelley-Ann Lindo

Artist in Residence presentation/exhibition 
Monday December 12th at 7.00 pm.



Ebony G. Patterson, in collaboration with Alice Yard, is pleased to support the research and working residency of Jamaican artist Kelley-Ann Lindo,  taking place from November to December 2016. Lindo will present a new multi media work-in-progress, Send Love inna Barrel, this Monday December 12th at 7.00 pm. 
All are welcome.



My  artworks are explorations. They are based often on personal situations. My previous work looked into the memories and visual legacies remaining after years of having experienced repeated flooding. Recently, this has shifted to focusing on the impact of parental absence due to emigration. A new work-in-progress, Send Love inna Barrel, investigates what is referred to as the 'barrel children' syndrome within Caribbean culture.
I want to find a way to make the viewer become part of the work, as a kind of added component to make it happen. I have been experimenting with a silhouette of a young girl’s head derived from my childhood photographs. These drawings were then developed further into silkscreened multiples, wall graphics and assemblages as well as video explorations. I am using barrels as a channel through which persons can engage and communicate over a distance. I like the idea of barrels, as being both cultural and sculptural objects. - Lindo

Kelley-Ann Lindo is a Jamaican-born artist. She attained a BFA in painting from the Edna College of the Visual and Performing Art in 2015. She has worked as gallery assistant at the CAGE Gallery 2014 and as Art Counsellor at the Bellevue Hospital in 2015. She has also worked as a photography and videography assistant for freelancer Alexander Bryan in 2010-2011 and as mural assistant for Martin Harrilal in 2010. Lindo’s work has been exhibited at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts Final Year student exhibition in 2015 and at the College’s CAGE Gallery in 2014. Lindo lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

A conversation with Bisi Silva and Ingrid Schaffner

Curators of the Carnegie International

Sunday 18 September, 2016, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Please join us at an informal reception to meet curators Bisi Silva and Ingrid Schaffner, who also will speak about their respective work and the Carnegie International

Bisi Silva                                             Ingrid Schaffner
















Bisi Silva (Lagos, Nigeria) is an independent curator and director/founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. She was Artistic Director of the 10th Bamako Encounters African Biennial of Photography (2015) in Mali, Co-Curator of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece (2009), and Co-Curator of the 7th Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennial (2006). She is the curator of Asiko (2010-) the pan-African roaming alternative art school. She co-curated The Progress of Love, a transcontinental collaboration between the Menil Collection (Houston), the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (Missouri), and CCA Lagos (2012–13) and J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Moments of Beauty at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2011). A frequent participant in international conferences and symposia, Silva has published in journals and art magazines including Artforum, Third Text, The Exhibitionist, and Art South Africa. She sits on the editorial/advisory boards of Art South Africa, N.Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, and Contemporary And. She was a member of the international jury for the Pinchuk Art Centre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014), as well as the 55th Venice Biennale (2013)

Ingrid Schaffner (Curator, Carnegie International, 57th edition, 2018) is an American curator, art critic, writer, and educator, specialising in art history. Prior to coming to Pittsburgh, she directed the exhibition programme as chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work often coalesces around themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms — especially Surrealism. She is the author of more than twenty books and nearly two hundred articles, reviews, and features, ranging from Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus to The Essential Andy Warhol, from an essay on exhibition wall text to an art history of chocolate. Born in Pittsburgh, Schaffner grew up in Los Gatos, California. She attended Mount Holyoke College and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Programme, where she was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow. She then received a master’s degree in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. After organising shows for the Drawing Centre, Swiss Institute, Haus der Kunst (Munich), Hayward Gallery (London), Independent Curators International, White Columns, and elsewhere, Schaffner was invited by then-director Claudia Gould to reshape and oversee ICA’s curatorial department.

Monday, September 12, 2016

out of place

Alice Yard • points in between • Granderson Lab September 2016


Out of Place, a curatorial collaboration between Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier and artist in residence Blue Curry, seeks to ask the following questions by instigating a series of events around Port of Spain:

How can we shift the encounter of visual objects or actions to more public spaces?

How can we alter or widen the way we understand the visual by dissolving received traditional boundaries between the object or action, its maker, and the viewer — untangling the idea of authorship?

How can we stage and engage the artistic process as a record of a creative or investigative action, as an experiential event available to everyone, rather than as a commodity, exclusively?

For announcements of events in the Out of Place programme, likely to be made on short notice, check the Alice Yard website or Facebook page.

Out of Place is part of YEAR X, a yearlong series of events reflecting on Alice Yard’s past and the possibilities of our future, running from September 2016 to September 2017.


Friday, September 2, 2016

Join us for the opening of

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September 2016 to September 2017
Alice Yard and Granderson Lab


X = symbol to mark a specific location
X = sign for multiplication
X = an unknown variable
X = 10

In September 2016, Alice Yard marks its tenth anniversary as a space for conversation and experiment. Beginning in a modest Woodbrook backyard, our activities have gradually expanded through creating a small gallery space, residency quarters for visiting artists and curators, a bandroom used by dozens of musicians for rehearsal, and the adjunct space Granderson Lab in Belmont, home to a number of artists and creative collaboratives.

We began ten years ago with questions and possibilities. Our evolution has been organic and open-ended. As we consider our actions and ideas of the past decade, our instinct is less to celebrate and more to affirm our spirit of investigation and exchange, our ethos of generosity and independence.

As we prepare to begin our second decade, on Sunday 11 September, 2016, Alice Yard will host an installation by artist in residence Blue Curry, alongside September 2006, a modest exhibition drawn from our archives and documenting the moment of Alice Yard’s beginning ten years ago. We will also share details of a curatorial collaboration between Blue Curry and Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier, which will unfold over the coming month: a series of site-specific, public-domain projects by various artists, exploring questions of authorship, decision-making, and the artwork as event or action rather than object exclusively.

These activities will also open YEAR X, a twelve-month programme of projects and events that reflect on the archive of our past and the prospects of our future. We invite our collaborators, interlocutors, and friends to join us in imagining what might be possible in “a backyard on a small island.”


All are invited.


Souvenir, by Blue Curry (hair combs, perspex plinths, billboard posters) for VITRINE, 2014

Thursday, September 1, 2016

“Artists, this space is available”

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Photograph by Nadia Huggins

“We wanted to see what was the range of creative disciplines that could be accommodated simultaneously, which is pretty much the way negotiations were forged in a traditional yard context in urban Trinidad.”

Alice Yard co-director Sean Leonard, on the influence of family generosity and Carnival productivity on his practice, and our decade-long experiment in this small backyard in Woodbrook — interviewed by Stephen Stuemplfe and published in the September/October 2016 Caribbean Beat.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Richard Williams: New Objects and Wall Collages

Thursday 11 August, 2016, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Installing Bloody Republic


















The artist will present a sequence of actions/experiments for one night only. Trinidad-born artist Richard Williams is influenced by contemporary wall graphics, graffiti, and the public performances of the Fluxus Movement. His creative explorations can be traced to their genesis in the yard of his family home in east Trinidad, and can now be seen on the streets of Germany.

“I moved to Germany about ten years ago… I began my formal art practice when I finished at the John S Donaldson Technical Institute design programme. Although I may be far from home, switching off my feelings of concern is not an option for me. I always pay attention to how we treat our environment and communities… My latest works combine the worlds of past and present. I am revisiting my past and bringing it into my present experiments. Showing the reality of T&T’s 2016 social collapse is important to me — dealing with these problems is the start for finding a way to solve it.”


Invasive Species (detail)


Rattan vs Plastic 

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Asha Ganpat: New Works

Thursday 4 August, 2016, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard


During her week at Alice Yard, artist in residence Asha Ganpat has made two series of new works: Save Me Hanuman!, using found printed materials (an illustrated children’s book of Hindu stories and a book on local insects), and Hard Alchemy, using coins and gold leaf. On Thursday 4 August, she will present these along with an informal short talk on her recent and current projects. The works will remain installed until Saturday 6 August.

All are invited.


Sunday, July 31, 2016

Introducing Asha Ganpat

Artist in residence, July and August 2016


Asha Ganpat is a multimedia visual artist who was born in Trinidad and now lives and works in New Jersey, where she is an adjunct professor of sculpture at Montclair State University, is an independent curator, and co-founded Red Saw Gallery in Newark.

In late July and early August 2016, Ganpat is artist in residence at Alice Yard, where she plans to use locally sourced media for her work. In one piece, she will combine images from a Hindu story book and a published survey of insect life in Trinidad to play out a vengeance fantasy spurred by the many bites and stings and near-misses over the years. In another work, Ganpat will look at the imbalance of currency exchange and will seek valuation and revaluation through a playful consideration of alchemy.

Ganpat received a BFA from Mason Gross, Rutgers University, and an MFA from Montclair State University. She has shown her work at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Insitituto di Cultura, Exit Art, the Noyes Museum, the Queens Museum, the Jersey City Museum, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Her work was cited as one of NYC’s top ten art installations of 2012 by Complex magazine. She is an alumnus of Aljira’s Emerge, Gaia’s Wonderwomen Program, the Annual New Jersey Book Art Symposium, and Chashama North residencies.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Captured in the Grip of Listening?

Photographs of People with Radios in (Post-) Colonial Bamako
A talk and research exhibition by Antawan I. Byrd
Wednesday 27 July, 2016, 7 pm, at Alice Yard


Studio Photo Diallo, Untitled, 1962, Silver Gelatin Print, 5 x 7 in., Private Collection

Antawan I. Byrd is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Northwestern University, studying modern and contemporary art of Africa and the African Diaspora. During the months of July and August, 2016, he is researcher in residence at Alice Yard.

His dissertation, tentatively titled “Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art”, examines how artists in Bamako, Port of Spain, and New York use sound technologies to engage profound moments of political change, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century.

On Wednesday 27 July, he will give an informal talk at Alice Yard, discussing his research on sound and photography in Bamako, and introducing his research interests and aims for Port of Spain. A selection of photographs collected during this research will be on display, continuing until Sunday 31 July.

All are invited.

Photo: Steeve Bauras

About Antawan I. Byrd:

Most recently, Byrd was an Associate Curator for Telling Time, the 10th Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography, 2015, and was a member of the editorial team for the 2012 Biennale Bénin Inventer Le Monde: L’artiste Citoyen. He was a curatorial assistant for J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Moments of Beauty at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in 2011. From 2009-2011, Byrd worked at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos as a curatorial assistant. His research has been supported by an Andrew Mellon CLIR fellowship, a Block Museum curatorial fellowship, a grant from Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies, and a Fulbright fellowship.

Monday, June 6, 2016

Alexandra Majerus: Down the Islands

Thursday 9 June, 2016, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard



During her time at Alice Yard, current artist in residence Alexandra Majerus has created a video work in response to conversations and text messages, which she will present on Thursday 9 June, along with an informal talk on her recent and current projects.

All are invited.

Alexandra Majerus is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video performance, and installation. With a half-Caribbean background, Majerus has repeatedly migrated between Barbados and Canada. She investigates the culture and history of Caribbean countries and their diasporas within their frameworks of colonialism and forms of neo-colonialism.



Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Introducing Alexandra Majerus

Artist in residence, May and June 2016


Alexandra Majerus is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video performance, and installation. With a half-Caribbean background, Majerus has repeatedly migrated between Barbados and Canada. She investigates the culture and history of Caribbean countries and their diasporas within their frameworks of colonialism and forms of neo-colonialism.

Majerus is currently an MFA candidate at OCAD University, and is looking at the dynamics of subjectivity and identity that lie between the constructed perception of Paradise and lived experience. During her residency at Alice Yard in late May and early June 2016, she plans to investigate the different and/or similar perceptions that Trinidadians may have of themselves and their landscape and culture in an economy that is not driven by tourism.

Monday, May 16, 2016

A conversation with curator Kristen Gaylord

Thursday 19 May, 2016, 7 pm, at Alice Yard 


Kristen Gaylord is the Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and a PhD Candidate at New York University.

During the third week of May 2016, she will be curator in residence at Alice Yard, meeting Trinidadian artists and investigating the contemporary art scene and Alice Yard’s network of collaborators.

On Thursday 19 May, at 7 pm, she will give an informal talk at Alice Yard about her experience of MoMA’s C-MAP global research programme. She hopes to start a discussion about the challenges and opportunities of curating from a “global” perspective, especially related to the Caribbean.

All are invited.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

AY/24/7: Joshua Lue Chee Kong

Flag of My Mother’s Land


A statement from the artist:

“This flag pays tribute to the work of fellow Trinidadian artist Carlisle Chang (1921-2001) who was a part of the Independence Committee that created the design for the national flag when Trinidad and Tobago gained its independence from Britain in 1962. It gives me great pride that another Trinidadian of Chinese ancestry created this iconic emblem. This flag is also a symbol for the Chinese diaspora who came before me in the late 19th century to work on the estates under the British colonial rule and have since made Trinidad and Tobago their home.

“What is this place called home? Is it the place where one was born and grew up, or is it a place where a billion look-a-likes walk around? This flag represents my roots and also my inner conflict of belonging. This feeling of disconnection was particular strong during my artist residency at Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. I was a stranger in my mother’s land where I looked Chinese but did not feel Chinese because I was unfamiliar with the language and to the culture.

“This flag was stitched in China during my time in Beijing. It comprises of found materials that were around my studio, from a street banner that was hung on the sidewalk of the main street to discarded clothing. All the materials were specially selected to represent my notion about China from the Chinese characters on the red banner and the oriental patterns of the cloth.

“In the end I just wanted to say even though my bloodline came from China, I will always be a ‘Trinbagonian’ no matter what.”


Joshua Lue Chee Kong was born in Trinidad and Tobago. He studied graphic design at the Savannah School of Art and Design, where he received a BFA. After graduating, he worked for a year at Alfalfa Studio in New York, developing his skills as a graphic designer. He is presently living in Trinidad doing freelance work in branding, publications and design consultations.

The artist is investigating expanded ideas of national identity, transcending traditional racial and social barriers. He has a keen interest in history and culture and is presently exploring Trinidad and Tobago’s folklore, aspiring to making it relevant to the present global family, while preserving its own cultural uniqueness.

His work had been published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, ANNO book, See Me Here: A Survey of Contemporary Self-Portraits from the Caribbean, the Draconian Switch e-magazine, and two of his photographic images appeared on the cover of TIME magazine.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Kiskadee Bride

A poem by Shivanee Ramlochan
read at Douen Islands: Kiskadee



In the courtyard, all our throats are burst figs.
Each cry is its own tyrant.

Beaks mark the pulse of entrail-love, cooing in yellowflesh.

Call your husband passerine,
feel him flit a goodbye beneath your eyelash.

Call your husband shrike,
sound your mourning bellow in the bill of his last farewell.

Call your husband home,
watch wings strum the hurricane screen,
wet like November in Lopinot,
wetter than a split-throat struck talon hard from above.

In the courtyard at night, close your eyes.

Be yourself braceleted in cagewire.
Be feasted upon by greedy mouth, by guttural swoop.

Hold his small prey in your open heart,
let the whole flock eat you out of the small rooms where you wait
to be made into a triplenotched perch.

Where all his cries in your cleft throat echo yes,
echo bright,
echo

kiss-kill me, kiss-kill me, kiss-kill me,

Carry him home to the cauldron of your canary bed.



Sunday, April 3, 2016

Douen Islands: Kiskadee

Saturday 9 April, 2016, 7 to 9 pm, at Alice Yard



Douen Islands is an ongoing, open collaborative project — featuring writers, poets, musicians, artists, photographers, and others — led by poet Andre Bagoo and designer Kriston Chen.

On Saturday 9 April, 2016, Alice Yard will host Douen Islands: Kiskadee, a performance event including words, images, movement, and music, as part of the 2016 NGC Bocas Lit Fest pre-festival programme.

All are invited.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

AY/24/7: Versia Abeda Harris

Merely a Chimera
Selected images in the Box and in the Yard 



“Fantasy is defined as unrealistic mental images on which one repeatedly dwells, that reflect one’s conscious or unconscious desires. These images do not always stay as thoughts in the mind but often manifest into physical objects/pictures, actions, words or behaviour. In my work, I think about how fantasy can manifest and how the reality of an individual may be pushed or bent by imagination.” —V.A.H.

 

A chimera is a single organism made up of genetically disparate cells, making it possible for the organism to have two opposing bodily features. It can also be defined as a thing wished for but is impossible to achieve. This image is selected from a series of 53 that documents a creature taking the various shapes of things observed in a continuous search for the ultimate identity.

Read more about the artist here.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Dangerous curves: a conversation about performance and politics

With Rosamond S. King, Gabrielle Civil, and Attillah Springer 

Tuesday 22 March, 7 pm, at Alice Yard
 

From Fugue (Da, Montréal), a performance work by Gabrielle Civil

What is the difference between art that is political, art that is about politics, and politic interventions that are artistic? Does it matter which of these we call “art” and which are considered activism? And when it comes to performative works and actions by women, is it ever possible for the female body — public, nude, or semi-nude — to not be read as political?

Artist, writer, scholar, and current Alice Yard resident Rosamond S. King will join artist Gabrielle Civil and activist Attillah Springer for an informal conversation on these and other questions about performance and politics.

All are invited, and audience members are welcome to join the discussion.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Pablo Delano: The Museum of the Old Colony

Friday 19 February, 2016, from 6 pm, at Alice Yard


The Museum of the Old Colony, an installation by Puerto Rican artist Pablo Delano, appropriates historical imagery and challenges established protocols of museum culture. The project derives its name from a brand of soft drink named Old Colony, popular in Puerto Rico since the 1950s. Old Colony (the beverage) remains available at island groceries and restaurants in two flavors: grape and pineapple. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico has endured 523 years of ongoing colonial rule — first under Spain, then the United States, since 1898. The island, an “unincorporated territory of the US,” is widely regarded as the world’s oldest colony.

The installation employs still photographs and moving images of Puerto Rico — along with their original captions or descriptive language — created mostly by US photographers, mostly for the consumption of a US general public. With sardonic humour and wit, the project references traditional historical or anthropological museums and their use of ethnographic imagery and didactic text panels.

The Museum of the Old Colony is as much an exploration of history as it is an intensely personal exercise by Delano to understand and come to terms with his own relationship with the island, where he was born in 1954.

The installation opens for public viewing on Friday 19 February, 2015, with a reception and conversation between the artist and Alice Yard co-director Nicholas Laughlin. The Museum of the Old Colony will remain on view until 26 February.

The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the conference Turning Tides: Caribbean Intersections in the Americas and Beyond, co-sponsored by the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

All are invited.

Friday, February 12, 2016

"Doh mix meh up" Sharelly Emanuelson

Monday 15 February, 2016, 7 pm, at Alice Yard
Sharelly Emanuelson will present her video, "Doh mix meh up" and share information about Uniartean arts organization, founded by the artist, in Curacao.

Sharelly Emanuelson (b.1986) is a filmmaker & video artist based in the Dutch Caribbean. She acquired her B.A. in Audiovisual Media from the School of Arts, Utrecht, followed by a M.A. in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Her first documentary film “Su Solo I Playanan” (2010) won an audience award at the Africa in the Picture film festival (2012). With her latest video installation “Doh mix meh up” she won the 2014 Royal Academy of Art Master award. Shortly after “Doh mix meh up” was shown at the Oxford University. Emanuelson’s artistic research, is concerned with two interdependent inquiries - materializing the effects, formations and entanglements of the colonial, hyper industrial period that erupted after the post-plantation world in the Dutch Caribbean territories and exploring the capability and incapability of representing Caribbean reality and sensibilities. She looks into traditional & alternative (hi)stories and landscapes to develop her own awareness about creole spaces – a transatlantic and interdisciplinary understanding of the world I/we experience today. Bringing together her research, collected material and the spectator’s experience the artist attempts to construct new contextual discourses that often remain on the verge of nonexistence.
Video still from "Doh mix meh up." 2014
In the context of Aruba’s 60th Carnival celebration, the work,"Doh mix meh up," uses Calypso & Roadmarch songs together with the discussions surrounding this event as a metaphor for negotiations on Aruban identity and nationalism, which keeps reinventing itself. Aruba seemingly has a “nationalism” that “fortunately” is not being shaped (according to conventional ways) because of its condition of constant negotiation. The “we”, referring to; the island Aruba, the community or the individual is incapable of giving an exact definition. This constant negotiation is thus a manifestation of diversity that shows us a fundamental characteristic of the Caribbean. The “we”, “nos”, “Rubiano”, “Rubianonan”[1], is an ongoing negotiation of the diversity of its people. In the search of identity, the collective unconscious recognizes an “under the surface” link and this manifests itself as seeing Trinidad as a prototype to follow. Apart from the existing link the Dutch Caribbean has with the Netherlands the work hints at the historical link Aruba has with Trinidad & Tobago. Together with Curacao, these three islands experienced a hyper industrial period, which was brought on by the arrival of oil refineries. The hyper industrial period is a link that the collective unconscious recognizes as a new beginning.
[1] Rubiano, Rubianonan means Aruban, Arubans in the Papiamentu language.

See more on the artist's work here



Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Hurricanes and wakes

An evening of poetry with Loretta Collins Klobah, Andre Bagoo, and Shivanee Ramlochan

Hosted by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest
Monday 11 January, 2016, 7 pm, at Alice Yard


Loretta Collins Klobah, author of The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman, is visiting Trinidad for the first time since winning the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry in 2012. On Monday 11 January, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest will host a celebration of her prize-winning book at Alice Yard, joined by Trinidadian poets Andre Bagoo (author of Trick Vessels and BURN) and Shivanee Ramlochan (whose poems appear in the recent anthology Coming Up Hot). In the work of these three writers, the forces of the natural world contend with human nature, and the supernatural erupts into the everyday.

All are invited.