EBB, FLOW, INTERRUPTION
Video screening with works by Michael Lees, Lisandro Suriel and Taisha Carrington
Fri 26 May, 8—10 p.m.

 

Location: Temporary Gallery
Language: English

Ebb, Flow, Interruption features the work of three contemporary artists whose works look at the nature of water as a metaphor through the lens of climate change, climate agency, spirituality and feminine embodiment. These experimental and documentary works are motivated by considerations that are growing ever present in the Caribbean region as Small Island Developing States grapple with rising sea levels, social implications of migrations, and cultural amnesia. These films invite us to experience the shifting tides from the perspective of those of us on the front lines of the sixth extinction, or the plantationocene.

Uncivilised by Dominican filmmaker Michael Lees, invites us to become witness to the elemental force of Hurricane Maria on the landscape and the body. The brutal and beautiful encounter represents a dichotomy on how weather patterns and aspects of disaster and catastrophe can be rendered as tools to think through rebirth, resilience and adaptation.

Lisandro Suriel’s Ghost Island takes inspiration from the photographer’s serial and surreal work that highlights the ways ancestrality, the sacred and the natural world provokes ways  to expand upon Caribbean cosmologies and world views. African and indigenous ontologies invite us into ritual, dance and polyrhythms exposing the texture of Antillean syncretism.

Barbadian multidisciplinary artist Taisha Carringtons’ State (of Mind) interrogates the language around our State(nation) and its impact on our state of mind/psyche. Words and phrases like ‘just a small country’, ‘developing nations’, ‘island’ (and its connotations of ‘isolation’) subconsciously affect ideas of self. Alone on an uninhabited Islet, Carrington forms a new space for herself on an empty island where she traces her corporeal shape in the sands subsequently filled by her body. A new ‘imaginary’ place outside of her nation forms.

Ebb, Flow, Interruption is curated by Sour Grass and offers a polyvocal and sensory way to engage with water as substrate, memory, landscape and climate.

Image
Taisha Carrington: State (of Mind), Videostill, Courtesy: the artist