What I have seen now is a couple of bad exhibitions (the reginal presentations and the Pop-Up show), but more importantly, a number of solid, interesting and sometimes great exhibitions. They showed works that were invisible for many years, they showed new works of promising artists, they showed a fruitful mixture of young and old, they made comparisons possible with artists from the region, on the whole they created an inspiring picture of the Caribbean.
Part of my family history is about deportation, we were taken from our land and brought to a new one that we built; we created new cultures.
I like to talk about this topic and others such as immigration and institutional discrimination in my work because they affected my family and ancestors
In a way, if the U.S. had (had) a Black Chief Photographer photographing President Obama along with the 1st Black Family, this would have been a perquisite for the future of the United States & with the racial issues in the United States being on an uneven foundation, politically as well as societal, knowing that a Black photographer witnessed & photographically recorded such a milestone in U.S. politics, would have been a visual freedom, worth looking forward to.
Van Oldenborgh’s Cinema Olanda – and actually her entire oeuvre – could be read as an aphasia-countering therapeutic session of a nation partially in denial, and partially unaware – such as the art critics so tellingly demonstrated. An endeavour that contributes to the birth of a new generation wanting and willing to finally come to terms with (post-) colonial melancholia and related repressive structures. These are the people who will be the forefront of a collective future: the unquestionable stars of a new generation.
The artists are reclaiming the street, personalizing public space, critically reflecting on how it has been, and is continuously, appropriated by others and the agendas they push. In entering this realm, with their own work in the form of posters, these artists alter the urban fabric of the city through its material form and resulting dialogue. They create physical sites of resistance to the dominant hegemony and communicate to people who take up and occupy these everyday spaces – roadsides, bus stops, estates, street corners etc.