SOUR GRASS CURATORIAL FORUM
Weaving Stories, Planting Seeds, Crossing Waters
Fri 26 May, 4—6 p.m.

Location: Temporary Gallery
Language: Englisch

Weaving Stories, Planting Seeds, Crossing Waters: Part I

Sour Grass co-founders Holly Bynoe and Annalee Davis will offer an overview of their collaborative curatorial work through this recently birthed platform supporting emergent cultural ecologies across the Caribbean space. From a post-colonial perspective, they will reflect on their collaborative approach to slow cultural work and degrowth which often grapples with the ongoing legacies of colonialism including the sixth extinction. Bringing Caribbean contemporary art and thought practices to the forefront of local, regional and transnational cultural exchange, they will share how notions of hospitality, healing, and community are reflected in their local, regional and transnational cultural exchanges.

Weaving Stories, Planting Seeds, Crossing Waters: Part II

Holly Bynoe will speak about her ongoing community activism sparked by institutional and climate catastrophe traumas. Through a decolonial lens, connecting to the ancestors and animism, she shares potential strategies of loving joyful care that one can employ in everyday living to counter the ongoing legacies of capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism and the vestiges of these systemic entanglements. Drawing inspiration from Dagara elder and shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé and feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway, she shares a gentle reminder of the freedom and pathways to waters, spirit, and life.

Annalee Davis will speak about her interest in finding ways to form more intimate relationships with landscapes mediated for centuries by the plantation facilitated by walking, writing, art-making, embroidery and growing plots inspired by a process of ‘innerseeing’ rather than overseeing. She will share the trajectory of her art practice over the last decade as a response to the existential climate crisis or the plantationocene–a preferred term–placing colonialism and capitalism in the driver’s seat of this epochal shift while proposing healthier ecosystems to counter exhausted landscapes through growing small living apothecaries currently thriving in Barbados and in Sharjah in the UAE.

Sour Grass is a curatorial agency founded by Holly Bynoe and Annalee Davis in 2020. This venture seeks to work with artists and creative practitioners from the Caribbean and across its diaspora, to build relationships with museums, cultural institutions, collectors, publishers, biennales, and both private and public entities. Sour Grass is particularly interested in alternative arts pedagogy, building discursive programming, and connecting with global worldviews and mythoi, bringing to life affinities and parallels with the Caribbean. Sour Grass functions as a decolonial body and a bridge to activate cultural manifestations of seeding, cross pollination, germination, cultivation and harvest.

"The Curatorial Unknown" is a series of meetings dedicated to curatorial practice initiated by Temporary Gallery Cologne and prepared in collaboration with a group of curators and institutions from Cologne and the region. The meetings are open to everyone interested in curating.

 

Images
1—Sour Grass’ Annalee Davis (left), and Holly Bynoe (right) at Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen in July 2022.
2—Loch (Tobar) Shianta, Staffin, Isle of Skye. February 2023
3—Pray to Flowers-A Plot of Disalienation, Sharjah Biennial, 2023