Brazilian artist Danilo Oliveira shares his first blog post about his Fresh Milk residency this month. Danilo will be documenting his experiences through a visual diary, sharing images and sketches that capture impressions of his time here. See more below:
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Visual diary f/ Danilo Oliveira in Barbados
If you don’t become the ocean
you’ll be seasick
every day.(Leonard Cohen 1934 – 2016)
Fresh Milk is pleased to welcome Brazilian artist Danilo Oliveira and British-Barbadian poet & artist Dorothea Smartt to the platform for the month of November, 2016.
Danilo’s recent work has focused on ways to engage with the idea, sensation and political concept of the border. Border defines identity, defines quality of life and shapes definitions of the future. Contemporary relationships with borders have two key aspects: abstractly, we have no more boundaries between us due to globalization; on the other hand, questions around borders have never been so relevant as they have in the last decades, in addition to all of the symbolic borders we encounter in our everyday life.
During this residency, he will be continuing his ongoing project ‘About Invented Borders’, by investigating borders in Barbadian and Caribbean society, looking at the history of the region and exploring its ties to Central America. Through research, his concept involves discussing the relationships people have with the boundaries around them and the collective memories of communities towards these borders; whether political, “official” borders or more complex, inner borders and barriers specific to different areas or cultures.
The project will include producing a series of drawings and installation work containing several invented maps drawings, made randomly in response to Danilo’s time in Barbados. The amount of drawings will vary according the spacial and temporal possibilities.
Dorothea’s work typically bridges the islands of Britain and Barbados, effortlessly shuttling between local and global scenes, as it weaves a diasporic web. She has two full collections, Connecting Medium [2001, Peepal Tree Press] and Ship Shape [2008, PTP]. In the latter, ‘a powerful work of reclamation, restitution and reanimation’ [Wasafiri] she offers a name and imagined life to the African buried in Samboo’s Grave, Lancaster.
Her latest chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, serves as a precursor to her ongoing research towards new live-art work and her third full poetry collection. She aims to continue reworking standard narratives, this time imagining same-sex relationships and cross-gender experiences in the early 1900’s among ‘West Indian’ workers on the Panama Canal.
Dorothea’s Fresh Milk residency will afford her an opportunity to play and create in a safe, welcoming space. She wishes to work towards creating a multimedia performance reflecting the internationalism of the Panama Canal construction, perhaps collaborating with artists she met during her time in Panama and other artists in Barbados. She will explore the possibility of a collaborative scratch performance, incorporating media such as Skype and PowerPoint presentations with live performance.
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Photo by Natalia Garcia
About Danilo Oliveira:
Danilo Oliveira is an artist, curator and professor based in Sao Paulo, Brazil:
“The last 17 years I’ve been working in various mediums: painting, drawing, muralism, graphic arts, conceptual and community based works. Especially connected to the idea of collective practice, I founded the group Ocavalo in 1999, and Base-V (base-v.org) collective in 2003, working in a few groups since then. Besides the lonely work at the studio when I’m painting, it’s the social insertion that is always the final goal, even for the paintings. Every artwork is a form of relation. The muralism and other works which expanded in the given space, have played a central role in my production. Now, even my canvas paintings only exist when articulated in the space: glued, nailed, stretched, tied. My curatorial practice works the same way: collective, seeking inclusion and with no artistic boundaries. I’m interested both in contemporary and “popular”, folk or ancestral productions and views on culture and art.”
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About Dorothea Smartt:
Dorothea Smartt has an international reputation as a respected poet, live artist, and literary activist. Born and raised in London, with Barbadian heritage, she has two full collections, Connecting Medium and Ship Shape [Peepal Tree Press]. Her recent chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, “…is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic…”. She was awarded an Attached Live Artist residency at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts, an Arts Council of England One-to-One live art development award, and most recently their Grants For All as an independent artist.
Over the past twenty-five years, her credits include engagements with the British Council in Bahrain, South Africa, USA, Egypt, and Hungary. Her seminal work “Medusa? Medusa Black!”, was cited as an O.B.E [Outstanding Black Example) of British live art. Other works include: “Triangle” [A Black Arts Alliance commission, with Kevin Dalton Johnson], exploring generations of UK Blacklesbian & Blackgay lives. “Tradewinds/Landfall”, an international cross-arts residency, exhibited in Houston, Texas and the Museum of London Docklands. In 2013 she was keynote speaker at Barbados’ Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award.
She is currently researching a new work, to culminate in a third full poetry collection. In it she continues to rework standard narratives. This time imagining cross-gender experiences, same-sex relationships, and the role of traditional religion/spirituality in sustaining the ‘West Indian’ workforce constructing the Panama Canal, in the early 1900’s.
She is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Programme Manager of Inscribe (Peepal Tree’s writer development programme), and Associate Poetry Editor at SABLE Litmag. In 2016 she was honoured with a nomination for a Barbados Golden Jubilee Award, and her collection Ship Shape proposed as an ‘A’ Level English Literature text.
London-based Barbadian artist Ada M. Patterson spent some time in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room earlier this year, which provoked ‘Echidna’, a performance work carried out at various locations across Barbados and expanded on in this accompanying photo essay. See documentation from this performance and read Ada’s full essay below:
Ada Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Speightstown, Barbados, 2016.
THE URCHIN
Home may easily always be “elsewhere”, by which I mean a place that is
recognised as not quite yet, at every moment in which one’s feet touch
ground. [1]
In the reclamations of one’s plot (in land and self) of the Caribbean, there is a continued
wading against colonial influence. In the contemporary Caribbean, touristic intervention has worked as an impediment against the formation of identity, while recognising one’s self situated in the oppressed dialogue. The Antillean is left flailing and thrashing in doubled attempts of rejection and hasty grasps of European and imagined African ideals; all in the hope of refinement and reparation of those shreds and scraps of identity into something new. This complicated resistance (which keeps itself open to the entry of desired culture) is a Caribbean wrestle – the crux of open-mouthed resistance. [2]
Humans are not so hardy that we can thrive in our bodies as castles – we are spoiled or
tasked with building shells [homes] as lines of defence and emblems of territory, property and
personal space. Sea Urchins are not so fragile. They are the perfect model for the Antillean openmouthed resistance – the performance of clinging to this land, claiming dominion, absorbing what is truly ours – overcoming dispossession – with a back of thorns to deflect assimilation and imperialism.
Each can return to the Skin without any inhibitions imposed by the exterior
attributes of the Castle. [3]
This invocation, rather than accessory, of the Urchin is a tactic of the Paradise Militant,
through which we must mobilise ourselves toward ingestive interpretation – the posture faced
downwards, mouth to dirt, consuming landscape as analysis – followed by the excretion of culture – the production and establishment of culture as waste-product of our analytical ingestion. We spend so much time, as a people, directing our mouths upward / outward, hoping to be quenched by food that falls from a colonised sky, one never thinks to look at their feet – downward to the land that grounds them as Caribbean.
Ada Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Speightstown, Barbados, 2016.
THE HERMIT
To invoke the Urchin is to invoke the ability of the Hermit – that which involves a capacity
for meditative and defensive states in similitude. The pursuit of identity, as experienced by the
Antillean (in their wake of Postcolonial reflection and neocolonial encounter), is arguably a
hermitage insofar as it requires a submergence into the Atlantic pool of memory, a self-burial beneath the soil of plantations ruined – of long erased Amerindian bone yards – alongside a negotiation against the gale-force battering ram of contemporary foreign visitation / consumption [a tourism as formidable as Sargassum]. A hurricane may only devastate what it can see as penetrable – the Hermit / Urchin is, fortunately, invisible and hardy in their decision to be laid locked in stubborn refusal of the storm’s incessant knocking. A land already ravaged by a history of storms need not be mourned but rather reinterpreted and analysed. As long as we of the Antilles remain, persistent in a culture of resistance, a storm may be discarded as trivial as the seasons and bracing it, the same.
In advocating a collective hermitage, what must take emphasis is the sublimation and fluidity between manoeuvring states – that is, a mastery of the Hermitic approach in their proverbial ascent up the mountain / into the cave [a marronage] whereby through a gaining of insight, in a meditation and a protective negligence against the Outside [the Foreign / the Overseas / the Abroad], an almost alchemical transformation occurs by which the Hermit descends or emerges graced with a nation language, [4] a language and cultural negotiation sophisticatedly illegible to the will of the coloniser. To reword this, an importance lies in the Antillean Hermit’s capacity to be present as a factor of influence in their society and culture, while still invisible and impenetrable to the touristic gaze and will; an Urchin who may face their island without risking their sanctity to the West of whom he backs. [5]
All music born in the West Indies […] were born from silence. Because it was forbidden to speak aloud and to sing. It was born from silence and in silence. One of the common cultural points of music in all the plantation areas of the Americas was the necessity to sing without being heard by somebody else, by the master or another person. The art of silence is fundamental in this kind of music. [6]
Ada Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Walkers Dairy, Barbados, 2016.
[Aside] Let it be made clear that this proposition is not instigating a historical rejection or denial
of colonial rule or Western influence in the Caribbean, like proposals before that seek to restore a lost Africa untouched by history [impossible]. This is, instead, a proposition that bears a
consciousness and hypersensitivity to the European presence and is hereby worn and embittered by its ongoing injection. Frankly, this Urchin has had enough. How may an island stand to look at itself if still knelt to a stature of servitude? How may an island stand to care for itself if still bent in gape to the prick of Empire? This Urchin’s flesh is tired of being picked by transatlantic flies who see an idyllic charm in the poverty and immobility of Caribbean people.
And so we collapsed into the ocean, creating a catastrophe of sunken memory and leaving only the sunken tips of these volcanic memories, the islands of the Caribbean. It is my impression that even now, a million years later, we still hear the echo of that catastrophe, and much of our work relates to that memory. We somehow lost the sense of the mainland, the sense of wholeness and we became holes in the ocean.[7]
The weight of contemporary Western influence sinks us and forbids us any time for the contemplation of culture and identity. The faces of our islands have been shaped – now is the time to learn and assert them – the continued treading of the visitor’s foot will only recede our shores further back towards uncertainty and dispossession; towards something that will only be ours in memory, in passing, in mourning, towards something that is taken from us once again – everything that constitutes we as a people.
Ada Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Walkers Dairy, Barbados, 2016.
THE MONSTER
Following the previous articulation of the Hermit, it must be clarified that this notion is an appropriation and adaption made suitable for Caribbean thought. Any quality or connotation of solitude produced by the Hermit archetype should be discounted in favour of a collective hermitage. What is meant by this is a mass transformation and movement of the Antillean community towards the posture of the Urchin, therefore a communal assumption of the nation language in an effort to deflect and resist touristic and outside persuasion. A cast of strewn islands erupting and foresting a black spiny cloud, every Antillean’s mouth to their own soil, each foot inter-crossed and woven to spin a net fat and soaking with an identity unhindered, uttering a salt language amongst itself, too spicy, too flavourful, too explosive, too excessive to ever be reduced to the limits of foreign interpretation – a harmony of resistance raised by a choir of cobblers. It is miraculous to see a rock pool or a coral plain coated in urchins – such a sight beckons fright and caution in the knowledge that no tread may pass, no foreign body may step nor land nor claim nor possess nor own nor colonise nor nothing. The miracle lies in the utterance of which the symbol of the sea urchin represents, “Doan cum ’round me!”
[…] another monster, irresistible, in no wise like either to mortal men or to the undying gods, even the goddess fierce Echidna who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful [8]
In collective assumption of the Urchin posture, may we undergo another sublimation; the invocation of the Monster. The qualities and potential inherent to the Monster involve a negotiation of invisibility alongside the accessory of the Grotesque [excess]. To be monstrous is to manoeuvre rather mythological attributes – to maintain a sense of being hidden, while also exuding a weight or presence in excess. [9] Echidna, the monster of Greek Mythology, who is described in opposing dualities of irresistibility and awfulness, may be linked in character to our understanding of the notion of the Paradise Militant. [10]
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.[11]
The split characterisation of the Monster is one of both temptation and repulsion, highlighting the dangers of that which is desired. Beholding a sea urchin – the black silken glow of crimson that melts across its spines, wet with pearls of light that drip in its gyration – is exciting and seductive, comparable to the thistle, a thorny rose or even the rich candied blue of a man o’ war – legend is spun in tales of seeing, but fortified through an inability to grasp. Lay a naked hand on a thorn, spike, tentacle and your skin will break, bleed and sting. Admire the fruits of the Tropics but forever lay humble and restrained in the promise of their pluck; a Paradise lost.
Ada Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Gibbes Beach, Barbados, 2016.
THE CARNIVAL
The sort of bodily excess to which I am alluding is of the same nature as our Carnival. The mobilisation of this posture as a collective act of resistance, while maintaining invisibility through the nation language, conjures the urchin rock pool, the spiked archipelago, the islands crowned with thorns, the Monster that is seen and admired but may always hinder tangibility and exploitation. Excess, as observed in Caribbean culture, may be enacted through the expansion of the body in collective celebration of the flesh. The agency of celebrative transformation may involve the transcendence of the individual towards the potency of the community as well as the compensation of one another’s limitations so as to promise a rising of the whole. The spirit of the community, as emphasised and exaggerated in Carnival practices, seeks to transgress the idealised ‘individual’, overriding the competitive ethics and economic cannibalism associated with Western Capitalist thought. The concentrated effort of the mass body in celebration, the collective body in excess, the Antilleans’ decision to assume the Urchin posture in resistance, may counter the crisis of cultural exploitation faced in the Caribbean.
Earth at that time was so excessively heated that it broke into an enormous sweat which ran over the sea, making the latter salty, since all sweat is salt. If you do not admit this last statement, then taste of your own sweat.[12]
The transformative potential of the Carnival space is the optimal environment for invoking the Urchin posture. Given Carnival’s cyclical process – a rhythmical progression of inhaling the material and the bursting of one’s seams, a repeated mass death and rebirth in excess, exhaust and revival – the collective body dances in synonymy and similitude, consuming one another (not cannibalistically but in a sense of osmosis) and allowing one’s self to transcend towards [and to be transgressed by] the other. There becomes a radical materialisation of the world in which cultural negotiation is a material engagement whose discourse may only be understood in the participatory Antillean flesh.
When the body is freed (when day comes) it follows the explosive scream. Caribbean speech is always excited, it ignores silence, softness, sentiment. The body follows suit. It does not know pause, rest, smooth continuity. It is jerked along. […] He keeps moving; it can only scream. In this silent world, voice and body pursue desperately an impossible fulfilment.[13]
Ada Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Gibbes Beach, Barbados, 2016.
The membranous sublimation of the revelling bodies is a dance spoken in laughter. The performance of nation language, finding its climax in the laughter of participation, leaves the tongue and coats the Antillean in camouflage, reiterating the duality of invisibility and presence. [14] In the ambiguity of the shift of bodies – passing through one another – the sheer joy of it all, the mass smile and the earthquake laughter become the nation language. For this is a means of cultural relation and communication unique to the flesh of the participants, falling deaf to the oppressor. In the overlap of spikes, does the black of urchins seem to form a single source of beautiful terror – where does it begin or end? In the nesting embrace of the Carnival space, where bodies [shells] and limbs [spikes] crowd and cluster, does a culture emerge in sweat [the same sweat that kept a people from burning in the toil of the sun]. In the dissolution of our individual flesh, to its meshing concretion in unity, do our islands erupt into being.
I will raise up a cry so violent
that I will spatter the sky utterly
and by my shredded branches
and by the insolent jet of my solemn wounded bole
I shall command the islands to exist [15] (55-59)
“No longer shall our shores bend and gape to the prick of Empire. Let the black urchins on
our backs extend arms outstretched as barbs – behold our islands crowned with thorns. May the
empire who maims and reduces us to paradise run aground our coral teeth. By its sting, does a
nation rise from welts. By our sting, does paradise bloom and throb as floating terror.”
References:
[1] Forbes, C. “Between Plot and Plantation, Trespass and Transgression: Caribbean Migratory Disobedience in
Fiction and Internet Traffic.” Small Axe, 2012. 16(2 38), 2012. 23-42.
[2] The coining of ‘open-mouthed resistance’ is indebted to the anatomy of the sea urchin, whose mouth is a
central orifice situated at the base of the creature. The urchin ingests food, which is digested upwards and excreted through the anus located at the central peak of the urchin’s dome. This term is to refer to a practice of repossessing the Caribbean landscape and cultural identity by returning a focus to the land, itself, while backing the distraction, interruption and assimilation of foreign neocolonial forces, in resistance.
[3] Lamming, G. “The Pleasures of Exile.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 159.
[4] Brathwaite, K. “History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry.”
New Beacon Books, 1984. 5-6.
[5] The eye of the foreign storm from which the Antillean as Urchin seeks to stay invisible, throws its gaze in vain. Scientific studies have shown that sea urchins have light-sensitive cells embedded throughout their body which allow them to detect light and its direction, so they may hide from it. The Urchin’s tendency towards invisibility is a quality we must adopt. See more: Yong, E. “Sea urchins use their entire body as an eye.” Not Exactly Rocket Science. Waukesha, WI: Kalmbach Publishing Co., 2011.
[6] Brathwaite, K. and Édouard Glissant. “A Dialogue: Nation Language and Poetics of Creolization.” Presencia Criolla en el Caribe y América Latina/Creole Presence in the Caribbean and Latin America. Ed. Ineke Phaf. Frankfurt am Main: Verveurt, 1996. 19-35.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Hesiod. “Theogony.” The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn -White. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 300-305.
[9] Excess in the realm of the Grotesque is to be read as an unquantifiable state of being – similar to the Sublime, yet based in the material, bodily world in flesh. The body when inflated to a plane of inconceivable physicality is an exaggeration of bodily potency and capability; a heightening of the body’s ability to expand and exhaust in fat, blood, sweat, excrement, etc. Moreover, in the case of the Monster, this capability may expand to the extent of cosmetic qualities; the excess of beauty or conversely, ugliness.
[10] This characterises the notion that Paradise is not passively beautiful – idyll in servitude – but may be activated to become Monstrous, resistant and autonomous in defence of paradisiacal natives and their culture against foreign exploitation.
[11] Rilke, Rainer M. “Duino Elegies.” Translated from the German by Stephen Cohen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. 21-43.
[12] Rabelais, F. “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” Translated from the French by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006.
[13] Glissant, E. and Dash, J. “Caribbean Discourse.” Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. 120-150.
[14] Glissant, E. and Dash, J. “Caribbean Discourse.” Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. 21-22.
[15] Césaire, A. “Lost Body.” The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. England: Oxford University Press, 2009. 39-40.
Work Cited:
– Brathwaite, K. “History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone
Caribbean Poetry.” New Beacon Books, 1984. 5-6.
– Brathwaite, K. and Édouard Glissant. “A Dialogue: Nation Language and Poetics of Creolization.”
Presencia Criolla en el Caribe y América Latina/Creole Presence in the Caribbean and Latin
America. Ed. Ineke Phaf. Frankfurt am Main: Verveurt, 1996. 19-35.
– Césaire, A. “Lost Body.” The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. England: Oxford University Press,
2009. 39-40.
– Forbes, C. “Between Plot and Plantation, Trespass and Transgression: Caribbean Migratory
Disobedience in Fiction and Internet Traffic.” Small Axe, 2012. 16(2 38), 2012. 23-42.
– Glissant, E. and Dash, J. “Caribbean Discourse.” Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1989. 21-22; 120-150.
– Hesiod. “Theogony.” The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G.
Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
300-305.
– Lamming, G. “The Pleasures of Exile.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 159.
– Rabelais, F. “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” Translated from the French by M.A. Screech. London:
Penguin Books Ltd, 2006.
– Rilke, Rainer M. “Duino Elegies.” Translated from the German by Stephen Cohen. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1998. 21-43.
– Yong, E. “Sea urchins use their entire body as an eye.” Not Exactly Rocket Science. Waukesha,
WI: Kalmbach Publishing Co., 2011.
Kingston-based curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson has been selected for this year’s Tilting Axis curatorial fellowship. Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, who has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.
Congratulations, Nicole!
The curatorial fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados and in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Scotland based cultural partners CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery, Hospitalfield and curatorial collective Mother Tongue produced a structural long-term fellowship for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean.
This new fellowship opportunity focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial development hailing from the Caribbean region, and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. Designed as a year-long programme between the Caribbean region and Scotland, it offers support for critical development of curatorial practice and gives a practical base in the partner institutions with visits to Scotland and throughout the Caribbean.
During the fellowship, Nicole Smythe-Johnson will travel to Scotland in November, and will also undertake research visits to Suriname, Barbados, Cuba and Grenada. Smythe-Johnson said: “I am very excited about the fellowship. I attended the Tilting Axis conference this year in Miami and really savoured the opportunity to meet other arts professionals and hear about other institutions in the Caribbean region. I love my island, but island life can be isolating and there is a real temptation toward the insular. This fellowship then, is the perfect opportunity to build on the connections I made at TA 2016, and get some answers to the questions that came out of that experience. I can’t wait to jump in with both feet, starting with Glasgow.”
David Codling, Director of Arts for the Americas, British Council said: “In so many ways which are often overlooked, the Caribbean is the epicentre of the Americas: for better or worse Europe’s involvement with what it called the “New World” began in the Caribbean and for many European countries, including the four nations of the UK, our relationship with the Caribbean is deep, intense and complex. The British Council is proud to support and to be associated with the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship which offers an opportunity to explore and understand that relationship and to promote new conversations.”
Holly Bynoe, co-founder, Tilting Axis said: “In keeping with the notion of tilting the axis which refers to the re-focusing of our gaze and harnessing our collective power to make the visual arts sector more sustainable in ways that resonate with our lived realities in the Caribbean, the introduction of the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship is one example of how this might happen. Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies made significant strides in its aims to fortify networks and extend the reach of the arts throughout the Caribbean, with its partners in the Global North. I am delighted that the inaugural fellow is Nicole Smythe-Johnson and eagerly anticipate what will come of her research across the Dutch, Spanish, and Anglophone Caribbean, concluding in what I am sure will be a rich and stimulating experience in Scotland.”
The fellowship is in partnership with CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery and Studios, Hospitalfield, Mother Tongue and Tilting Axis. Supported by the British Council.
For more information, images or interviews, please contact Julie Cathcart, Communications Manager, CCA – julie@cca-glasgow.com / 0141 352 4911.
About Nicole Smythe-Johnson:
Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, living in Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.
About CCA:
The Centre for Contemporary Arts is Glasgow’s hub for the arts. The building is steeped in history and the organisation has played a key role in the cultural life of the city for decades. CCA’s year-round programme includes cutting-edge exhibitions, film, music, literature, spoken word, festivals, Gaelic language events and performance. CCA also provides residencies for artists in the on-site Creative Lab space, as well as working internationally on residencies with Palestine, the Caribbean and Quebec. CCA curates six major exhibitions a year, presenting national and international contemporary artists, and is home to Intermedia Gallery showcasing emerging artists.
About Hospitalfield:
Dedicated to contemporary art and ideas, Hospitalfield is a place to work, study, learn, visit and enjoy. Hospitalfield is an artist’s house in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, with a captivating cultural and social history that spans many hundreds of years. The contemporary arts programme is anchored in the visual art yet encourages interdisciplinarity, supporting the production of new work and providing space for debate and learning through residencies, a summer school and four public projects with new commissions each year. The organisation maintains strong national and international working partnerships with the aim of making Hospitalfield a meeting place and cultural catalyst in the working lives of artists, students and creative professionals in Scotland and far beyond.
About Mother Tongue:
Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. Since 2009, they have produced exhibitions, screening programmes, discursive events, essays and texts, working in partnership with galleries, museums, festivals, and publishers. Mother Tongue’s practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – post-colonialism, language, translation, heritage, identities, indigenousness, migration, and movement. They are currently researching the presence, work and exhibition histories of artists of colour in Scotland, working towards a future ‘AfroScots’ exhibition project.
About Tilting Axis:
Tilting Axis is a roving project conceptualised by ARC Magazine and the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. The first iteration was hosted at Fresh Milk in Barbados in February 2015 under the banner Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean | Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity. Tilting Axis 2.0 was hosted by the Pérez Art Museum Miami in February 2016. This meeting explored the current state of cultural work in the Caribbean, and aimed to fortify networks, increase administrative and programming capacities, as well as transfer knowledge and funding opportunities to those working in the region. The Tilting Axis Emerging Curatorial Fellowship developed out of the second iteration and the next edition of the meeting is slated to take place in April 2017, hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI).
About The British Council:
The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations. The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We call this cultural relations. We build trust and understanding for the UK to create a safer and more prosperous world. In terms of our reach and impact, we are the world’s leading cultural relations organisation. Cultural relations is a component of international relations which focuses on developing people-to-people links and complements government-to-people and government-to-government contact. We use English, Arts, and Education and Society – the best of the UK’s great cultural assets – to bring people together and to attract partners to working with the UK. The British Council has over 7,000 staff working in 191 offices in 110 countries and territories.
Fresh Milk and Fresh Art International are collaborating to present Fresh Talk: Caribbean, a series of podcasts about creativity in the 21st century with a Caribbean focus.
This week’s episode features Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, one of fifty artists that curator Juan Delgado invited to participate in the public art exhibition Detras del muro (Behind the wall) during the 12th Havana Biennial.
Click here to listen to the full podcast.
About Fresh Art International & Fresh Talk:
Mission: To inform and inspire a world of followers, Fresh Art International’s team shares conversations, commentary, news, and views about contemporary art.
Launched in October 2011, Fresh Art International is an evolving independent media outlet with a global point of view. Our website is the virtual platform for Fresh Talk: Conversations About Creativity in the 21st Century, our signature audio podcast. The site welcomes up to 3,000 monthly visitors. Averaging more than 9,000 feed hits monthly, we welcome new friends and followers every day: Facebook (3,000+ Likes and Friends) and Twitter (5,000+ Followers).
For Fresh Talk, independent curator Cathy Byrd meets with contemporary artists, curators, designers, architects, composers, writers, filmmakers and other cultural producers. Listen to conversations directly on this website, download episodes, or subscribe to the series on iTunes and Stitcher. Fresh Talk is also accessible through Public Radio Exchange at prx.org.
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