Through Fractured Realities, Ways of Knowing Emerge

(Exhibition Text for the exhibition Fracture/Repair)

Are fracture and repair oppositional terms, or can they be understood generatively in conversation? Whether physical or psychic, fracture may constitute a necessary unearthing that illuminates what lies below the surface or is overlooked. Repair as a process is not foreclosed by a definitive end or an outlined set of measures. It is not linear and cannot be quantified, conceived as an undetermined process and aspirational pursuit. Colonization in the Caribbean signifies a fundamental rupture, characterized by the genocide of the region’s indigenous population, Trans-Atlantic slavery, indentured servitude for South and East Asian immigrants, and major economic migration to the metropoles. In the face of centuries of violence, does repair remain possible? The artists in fracture/repair contend with these histories and the fissures of Caribbean subjectivity, embedded into the social and environmental topographies of each country. With lens-based practices that draw on archival documents, modes of portraiture and landscape photography, Nadia Huggins, Andrew Jackson, Renluka Maharaj, Junior Sealy, and Ricardo Miguel Hernández delve into the visual realm of the region, not to represent, but to contemplate and ignite questions that attend to the textures of a Caribbean always in a process of becoming. 

Archives are contested sites of knowledge with the potential to stimulate alternative narratives, at times buckling under the demands for an irrefutable truth. Both Maharaj and Hernández approach archives to carry forth histories that yearn for greater attention, employing intentional acts of care through image making. Maharaj centers the “coolie belles”, Indian women in Trinidad and Tobago whose portraits were used by colonial regimes to exemplify a multicultural exoticism and attract tourists to visit the islands. In “Chandika”, she overlays a meticulously staged portrait that repositions the “coolie belle” as an active participant in constructing the image, with a photograph of cane fields from the U.S. Sugar Corporation headquarters, and an archival image of Black and Indian workers on a sugar estate. Maharaj emphasizes the fraught sovereignty and violent exploitation experienced by the indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean, with the multifaceted racialized intimacies forged amidst these conditions.  

Like Maharaj, Hernández employs critical modes of juxtaposition to tease out the nuanced layers of interconnected histories that are often simplified in attempts at presenting coherent narratives. He affirms the centrality of Black women in the formation of Caribbean societies through a re-envisioning of the iconic Greek sculpture Venus de Milo, restored in April 1936. Standing in the vastness of the clouds, “La Venus de la zafra” articulates a self-determined leisure as she gazes at the viewer in her bathing suit. Below her, carts filled with cane underscore the integral role of her labor in Cuba’s sugar industry, which remains the country’s principal agricultural export, through manual, reproductive and emotional extraction.

Andrew Jackson, Junior Sealy, and Nadia Huggins animate the interwoven textures of the environmental and social realities of the Caribbean. A young girl stands in the street under the shade of overhead trees, her back to the camera in “Outside the house where Amy once lived”. Concrete walls and zinc fences flank either side, the houses signaling the architecture of most working-class neighborhoods in Jamaica. Jackson’s practice thinks critically about the entanglements of migration, referencing experiences of the Windrush generation that left the Caribbean for the United Kingdom. Lives tinged with nostalgia for a home to which they may never return, the accrued memories blur with time. Is the new home, with its ubiquitous alienation, better than the conditions left behind? Sealy attends to landscapes that are flattened by the rhetoric of tropicalization. [1] In“Transformations”, a young woman’s body melds into the sludge of volcanic mud. It is not only a reminder of the unsettling presence of volcanoes on several islands, including Montserrat and St. Lucia, but also the instability of the Anthropocene as the environment continues to negotiate extractivist policies.  

A mixture of blue, black, and gray tones engenders a surreal atmosphere as the sun looms overhead and the distance between land and sky seems eerily close. Huggins distorts spatial perception as the silhouette leaps free from the confines of gravity, even if only momentarily. Her practice foregrounds a profound co-presence grounded in respect for the unmediated Caribbean terrain–the sea providing a reprieve for the mind to wander. This oceanic sensibility is imbued with dense histories of lives taken and relinquished; connecting distant shores, a repository for memories of worlds rooted in a shared genesis. In “Circa no future” she attends to the quotidian through acts of gathering, often central to the sociality of Caribbean masculinity, alongside the acute awareness these men possess of the sea’s intensity. 

The Caribbean has been described as the “crucible of modernity”, the first landing point for European colonization in the Americas. For the artists in fracture/repair, the region is not fixed in the past, or simply overdetermined as an addendum to global histories of colonial conquest. It is a complicated area of immense knowledge, contradictions, and fluctuating desires, which will always evade facile categorization. In her essay “The Great Camouflage”, the philosopher and poet Suzanne Césaire writes, “if my Antilles are so beautiful, it is because the great game of hide-and-seek has succeeded, it is then because, on that day, the weather is most certainly too blindingly bright and beautiful to see clearly therein.”[2] Césaire indicates an opacity that is inherent to the Antilles, camouflaging the true complexities that permeate that interstitial realm amidst fracture and repair. 

Notes

[1] Krista Thompson. “Tropicalization describes the complex visual systems through which the islands were for tourist consumption and the social and political implications of these representations on actual physical space on the islands and their inhabitants.” An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.5, 2006.

[2] Suzanne Césaire. The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent.” Edited by Daniel Maximin. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.