SEMINAR STARTS AT 16.00 PM AND ENDS AT 17.30 PM (CET)

The presentation discusses a selection of Jamaican contemporary art as after-images of its mid to late century pantheonization project and investment in heroic public sculpture. 

It is interested in the generation of artists who draw from a nationalist heroic iconography to ask new questions about the state project developed around this symbolism, particularly around the meaning of power and violence today.  It considers that as successive governments, since independence, abandoned state investment in the (sculpted) black historical hero their retreat from history has opened up the aesthetic possibility in non-sculptural or non-figurative sculptural forms to be that space for new conversations about black historicity, power, leadership and visibility.

The research places the Jamaican post-colonial experience and art practice in conversation with contemporary Caribbean art and the global conversation on the recovery and reconstitution of the black heroic body in monumental form.

Speaker

Petrina Dacres is an educator and curator on contemporary Caribbean and African Diaspora art and visual culture. She is Head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica.  Petrina is also a founding member of Tide Rising Art Projects, an organization created to support and promote contemporary Caribbean art and film. Her research areas include the art and politics of memory in the Caribbean, public monuments and heroism in contemporary Caribbean art. Currently she is a fellow at KITLV where she works on her analysis of commemorative statues and monuments in Jamaica to contemporary (anti)heroic art practices in the region.

Moderator

Rosemarijn Hoefte is a historian specialized in the Caribbean. She is Professor in the history of Suriname after 1873 in comparative perspective at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests are the history of postabolition Suriname, migration and unfree labor, contemporary Caribbean history, and nation building and nation branding in postcolonial states.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 10 July from 16.00 – 17.30 PM (CET).

Image

Omari Ra, Excavation, Jack Mansong, 2007. Photograph by Wendeline Flores.

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