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Reading the Image: Poetics of the Black Diaspora

Christopher Cozier Once You Have Bread and Wheels You Good To Go 2006 (detail); video, bread, plastic wheels, wood, paper.

Reading the Image: Poetics of the Black Diaspora brings together the works of artists Deanna Bowen (Toronto), Christopher Cozier (Trinidad and Tobago), Michael Fernandes (Nova Scotia), and Maud Sulter (Scotland). The exhibition includes photography, video, and installation, each work aesthetically distinct yet linked to the others through a shared preoccupation with Black embodiment, subjectivity, and agency. The Black Diaspora can be thought of as the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of African people outside their homeland and the hybridization of culture that occurs as a result of exposure to new influences. The exhibition’s contributors use that concept to explore issues such as the role of Black people in, and their relationship to, modernity; the history of Christianity and the church as a social institution in the Black world; community and racial formation; and the influence of systems of representation on colonial and postcolonial histories.

The exhibition is based on the idea that the creative manifestations of Diaspora are the result of a need for specifically Black spaces in which individuals can come to grips with the concept of racialized selfhood. The works represent a range of aesthetics and world views that express, reflect, and retell stories of modernity from a first-person perspective. Within these stories, blackness and diaspora are presented not as essences, but as geographically specific social constructs.

It is significant that this exhibition began in the Chatham-Kent region of Ontario, where fugitive slaves from the United States created spaces for new realizations of Black selfhood. In Halifax, descendants of Black Loyalists, slaves, Maroons and refugees maintain a Black presence dating back to the 1700s. For both populations, present-day reality is a manifestation of the myriad social, political and historical influences at play in the journey between there and then, and here and now.

For further information, please contact Monetta James at 902-457-6291, art.gallery@msvu.ca.The Art Gallery has digital image files and printed catalogue is available for sale for $5.00.

ARTIST’S TALK: Xpat, with Michael Fernandes, on Tuesday 8 May, from 7 to 8 pm. The free charter bus leaves 5163 Duke Street at 6:30 pm, returning downtown at 8:00 pm.

MSVU Art Gallery Presents a public screening of Race is a Four Letter Word A film directed and written by Sobaz Benjamin, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Poetics of the Black Diaspora.

Thursday, May 17, 4:30pm at MSVU Art Gallery.

In this film, Sobaz Benjamin show cases the stories of a white man who is culturally and psychologically black; of a black woman who wants to be considered iconically Canadian; of another black woman who retreats to England rather than continue to face Canada’s racial cold war; and of himself, a black man who has learned to love his complexity.

Shauntay Grant interview with Ingrid Jenkner

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