Out of horror and destruction there can come creativity and beauty.
That idea is explored in “everything slackens in a wreck,” an art exhibition to be held at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York – the first physical show since the gallery closed in January 2020.
Curated by Trinidadian artist, author and professor Dr Andil Gosine, the exhibit will take place from June 1-August 20.
Gosine explained that it combined and re-imagined artifacts and images associated with indentured labour. Artists include Margaret Chen of Chinese-Jamaican decent from Canada, Andrea Chung from the US who has a Chinese-Jamaican father and a Trinidadian mother, Indo-Trinidadian Wendy Nanan, and Indo-Guadeloupean Kelly Sinnapah Mary.
[caption id="attachment_957192" align="alignnone" width="768"] Trinidadian artist, author and professor Dr Andil Gosine. Photo courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery and Andil Gosine. -[/caption]
Gosine, a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University, Toronto, and author of Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, said he thinks of the Americas as the product of wreckages – colonial ships, ships carrying slaves, and ships that brought indentured labourers.
Wreckage evokes colonialism and the destruction left in its wake. But those who were marginalised engaged in “wrecking work,” answering the destruction with art that offers order, alternate visions of existence, and co-existence.
“Indentureship is this important moment after the abolition of slavery that, of course, impacts the whole make-up of the Caribbean, but it often doesn’t get registered. For me, in looking at the indentureship work, and looking generally at the Caribbean, people arrived and things were striped from them whether it was through genocide of Amerindians or the enslavement of African people – people lost everything, including their lives.
“But, at that same moment, the resilience of the human spirit is such that these exciting new things are created. I mean, Trinidad without doubles?! What would we do?!”
He added that, in his opinion, one good wreck was that the caste system of India did not make it to TT, which allowed for lives and circumstances to be reshaped.
He said he was tired of the “suffering tone” adopted when it comes to work about the Caribbean. With that in mind, he preferred to highlight the creativity of the people who went through those challenges, thereby showing their strength, resilience, creativity, and inventiveness.
“For me it was important to look back at this brutal history of the Americas and not just see the brutality. Because simultaneously, whether it was indigenous, enslaved or indentured people, no matter how horrible the conditions, they had to find ways to find moments of pleasure and joy to just survive.”
Those coping and survival mechanisms resulted in the way these Caribbean countries are now.
Gosine said he initially proposed the exhibition to the museum in 2018, but its 2020 launch was delayed because of the pandemic.
The idea came to him in 2012 when
