Gavin Jantjes
Until August 21, 2016.
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5QP, United Kingdom
From Korabra Series, 1986.
About:
In partnership with the Black Artists and Modernism project, the Herbert will present paintings from the Korabra series by Gavin Jantjes. Created in 1986 at the West Indian Association Club in Coventry, the paintings explore the transatlantic slave trade.
Korabra Series, 1986.
Up until the nineteenth century, around 300 million people from Africa were seized from their homes, and exported to become slaves. This series of paintings explores the issues surrounding this trade of people, and the suffering of those involved. The word `Korabra’ comes from Ghana and means `to go and come back’. It is also a name for a funeral drum sounded for the dead. Many people died on the transatlantic crossings because of the terrible conditions in which they were held.
This exhibition is one of a series of interventions around public art collections in the UK carried out as part of the Black Artists and Modernism project.
Black Artists and Modernism (BAM)
Korabra Series, 1986.
Black Artists and Modernism (BAM), is a three-year research project led by University of the Arts London (UAL) in partnership with Middlesex University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). BAM will investigate the artworks of Black-British artists and the works’ relationship to modernism. The term ‘Black-British’ takes its cue from political and cultural debates of the 1980s, where people of African-Caribbean, South-East Asian and East Asian descent identified common experiences of disenfranchisement. Designed to reach a wide audience from students and academics to a more general audience for the arts, BAM will focus its attention on highlighting art-works held in major public collections and key exhibitions that have taken place in the post-war period via an online database and website. The project will look at how these cultural artefacts have been framed within the larger story of 20th century (text Herbert Art Galley).
