ALTHOUGH EACH OF THE ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION HAS A PARTICULAR VIEW OF THE CARIBBEAN RELATED TO HER OWN LIFE EXPERIENCE, THEY SHARE A COMMON SUSPICION OF OVERARCHING NARRATIVES, AN EMBRACE OF HETEROGENEITY, AND AN ATTITUDE OF DEFIANCE TOWARDS CONVENTIONS THAT WOULD SEEK TO CONTAIN THEM.- Tatiana Flores
‘Kibri a kulturu’ or ‘preserve the culture’. This theme is the heart and soul of the work of the
Surinamese visual artist Marcel Pinas (Pelgrimkondre, Marowijne District, 1971). The cultural heritage of the Surinamese Maroon community of the N’dyuka, also known as the Aucaners, is Marcel Pinas’ source of inspira on as well as his mo ve in all endeavors he undertakes. ‘Kibii wi koni’ or ‘preserve our wisdom’ takes this theme one step further. One layer deeper.
As a child, I became curious about the meaning of my Christian name and though I searched and searched, I could never find it anywhere. It was my mother who was responsible for christening me ‘O’Neil,’ she absolutely loved the name when she rst heard it but – as circumstance would have it – so did quite a few other new mothers the same year I was born. Rather than have her son be lost amongst the sea of variations: Oneal, Oniel and of course the most popular Oneil, she decided to use the spelling usually associated with the surname. Because of this I never did nd my name in any of the baby name books but I did nd Neil which means ‘champion’ and the ‘O’ with an apos- trophe, I also found out, means ‘son of’ so by default my name means Son of a Champion.
“Town to Town” is about the busy urban life style and experience of Bridgetown and Cape Town. There are similarities and also contrasts between these two towns. I believe what makes this exhibition interesting, is that in most of the art works, you cannot really distinguish which stores, shopping windows or streets belong to which town.
Available At All Leading Stores has been exhibited in collaboration with the following curators: Andrea Fatona: Reading the Image, Poetics of the Black Diaspora, Canada Marianne de Tolentino, 1st ACP Group Cultural Festival in the Dominican Republic. Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet: Arte Nuevo InteractivA ’07, Mexico. Julieta González: 2nd Trienal Poli/Grá ca de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe, Puerto Rico.
After the success of the first ‘big River’ workshop in 1999, CCA was asked to initiate and co-ordinate workshops in the Caribbean and Latin American regions in partnership with the Triangle Arts Trust a UK based, international organisation that has initiated workshops in over 23 countries worldwide, with over 2,500 participating artists. Our joint primary objective is to initiate and facilitate the exchange of ideas and practice between an exten- sive network of artists around the world. The big River 3 International Artists’ Workshop occurred between the 23rd of February and the 10th March, which closed with The Final Show at The Little Carib Theatre on Sunday the 12th March 2006.
John Ambrose Kenwyn Rawlins was an ordinary man of modest means. He was a good father, grandfather and husband; an obedient public servant. Yet the most vivid part of his life was lived in was a small workshop beneath his house. In there, at the end of his workday, he made things. From simple push toys to elaborate 1/16th scale waterline battle ship models and dockyards, miniature furniture and dolls houses, he painstakingly constructed everything from scratch, sometimes spending upwards of a year on a single model. Smallman is an exploration of the worlds, both real and imagined, that Kenwyn Rawlins made.
See the film here: Studio Anansi Stallman
Check out the smallmanfilm.com
Radical Upgrade created for the seminal Jeans Art Project in 2007
examines the quality of the right name and it’s value in
Trinidadian Society
