[Many thanks to Veerle Poupeye (Critical.Caribbean.Art) for bringing this item to our attention.] Right here is an excerpt from Janine Mendes-Franco’s “Bridging the divide / Portfolio” for Caribbean Beat (Challenge 170 Could/June 2022). Mendes-Franco explores the “greatest ever presence” of Caribbean artists at two of the world’s most vital up to date artwork occasions — the Venice Biennale (23 April–27 November) and documenta fifteen (18 June–25 September).
[. . .] This 12 months’s editions are each extra various and inclusive, with a stronger Caribbean presence than ever earlier than.
Trinidadian up to date artist Christopher Cozier is just not completely stunned. He calls it the “post-Okwui second”. Nigerian artwork critic Okwui Enwezor [. . .] started to shift the paradigm, Cozier says, away from the platforms being “conveyor belts for artwork stars”. [. . .]
This epidermal layer of the biennial, which options 213 artists — nearly all of them exhibiting in Venice for the primary time — spotlights work by a number of regional creators who’ve routinely straddled this transhistoric divide: the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón, sculptor Firelei Báez from the Dominican Republic, and a handful of Haitian artists, together with Drapo Vodou, textile maker Myrlande Fixed, self-appointed (and self-taught) “historic animalist” Frantz Zéphirin, and the late grasp painter Célestin Faustin, whose fantastical canvases famously chronicle the battle between his attraction and antipathy in the direction of the Vodou non secular practices of his homeland.
[. . .] This 12 months, Sonia Boyce, who has Barbadian roots, is representing Britain; her compatriot Alberta Whittle, Scotland; and sculptor Simone Leigh — whose dad and mom are Jamaican — america.
Their collective occupation of such vital areas is dazzling and [. . .] lengthy overdue. Boyce’s artwork makes some extent of inviting the spectator into the expertise; Whittle makes use of empathy and the facility of the collective as instruments to counteract anti-Blackness; and Leigh is fascinated by how Black feminine subjectivity performs out in historic contexts.
[. . .] As Whittle stated when she acquired the Scotland fee, “With so many pressing conversations on well being, grief, refusal, race and therapeutic on the forefront of my thoughts, now could be the second to ask questions on how we will unlearn and be extra actively reflective on a private stage in addition to collectively.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-170/bridging-the-divide-portfolio#axzz7SEZKOnMD
[Shown above, photo by Matthew A. Williams: Alberta Whittle.]