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.

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.

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.

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.

"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 Uniarte, an 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

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.

Three months in Trinidad

New work by Tessa Mars
Thursday 17 December, 2015, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Haitian artist Tessa Mars arrived in Trinidad in October 2015 to begin a three-month residency at Alice Yard. On the evening of Thursday 17 December she will present her work in progress from her stay in Port of Spain, including a series of drawings, paintings, zines, and prints. These include twenty unique handmade zines available for sale, and a photocopied zine which will be freely distributed to the audience.

During her time in Trinidad, as she describes in a recently published note, Mars has created a character named Tessalines, an alter ego through whom the artist has processed the sometimes overwhelming “influx of information and sensation” resulting from her immersion in a new place and context.

Mars’s residency at Alice Yard is supported by a travel grant from the French Institute (“Visa pour la creation” programme/Afrique et Caraïbes en Création).

All are invited.

“A time of letting go”

Haitian artist Tessa Mars arrived in Port of Spain in October 2015 for a three-month residency at Alice Yard, supported by a travel grant from the French Institute (“Visa pour la creation” programme/Afrique et Caraïbes en Création). She offers some reflections on her time in Trinidad thus far.

Tessalines, a fictional alter ego created by the artist


My time in Trinidad and Tobago has from the beginning been a time of intense discovery. Everything around me is new and different, from the food to the vegetation and wildlife. The flashes of familiarity I often experience during my day-to-day dealings with local culture are altogether too brief. Though excited, I find myself at times overwhelmed by the newness.

But instead of retreating from this sudden influx of information and sensation, in the early days of my stay, I spontaneously created an alter ego figure named Tessalines to deal with it for me. Tessalines allows me to keep my distance from the world around, filtering the immersion experience through the lens of her self-fullness, reducing it to key moments of my stay, as insignificant as they may be, for easier consumption (or assimilation).

My work has thus taken a completely surprising and unexpected turn. I am holding on to Tessalines while trying to better understand who we are together here, and develop us even further. Because, although her main reason for coming into being was to offer me a safe and unchangeable haven, her existence cannot be reduced to this only function. Tessalines has a name, attributes, a personality, and a past that I intend to explore. It is an exciting journey that begins here at Alice Yard. A long work of reflection, research, and questioning starts here, that will continue past the time I return to Haiti. For Tessalines will surely continue to surprise me in my homeland.                                                                  

My stay at Alice Yard has so far been a time of letting go. Letting go of the “project”, accepting that it is evolving, adapting, that plenty needs to be reconsidered, thought about again. Letting go of the idea of having a clean finish, of having an answer to the riddle of my stay. I have taken the time to be a spectator of my own creative process, to sit back and observe the slow unfolding of an idea from day to day. To be surprised and to be both indecisive and in control in turns. I truly believe I can only grow as an artist from this process.