95%: Jordanna Kelly and Jenna Chaplin’s NELEVEN Installation

It is dark in the hallways of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Our new exhibition, NELEVEN: INTO THE VOID is filled with shadowy walls, provocative artworks, and conceptual ideas that challenge what the Bahamian future could look like. When co-curator Richardo Barrett and I sent out the call for works last year, we asked the art community to think about this future: what resources would we use? How would we survive in this new ecological reality? 

Held every two years, the National Exhibition (NE) is a space for Bahamian artists to show contemporary work that reflects the current ethos of our community, and honours work that is grounded in the advancement of practice, dialogue, and social engagement. For the eleventh iteration of the programme – NELEVEN – we hoped to see innovative artwork that represented a turn, in not only contemporary Bahamian art practices, but in the many ways we think about how we relate to each other on the islands.  

The result of our call is an exhibition of artworks that explore what it means to survive in a Caribbean space, especially when so many things are out of our control – including our environment. A running theme throughout the exhibition is water: our history with it, how do we deal with it, and the ways we can nurture our aquatic spaces so that they can become healthy, thriving ecosystems for future generations.   

Jordanna Kelly and Jenna Chaplin’s interactive installation is a good example of this. Viewers are invited to take off their shoes and walk through a pool of water, surrounded by plexiglass sculptures of coral and fish. Titled 95%, the piece is meant to confront the reality that a large percentage of Bahamians are unable to swim, and therefore unable to engage with a significant part of our ecosystem. “95% of The Bahamas is ocean, and nearly the same percentage of the population cannot swim well enough to experience it,” the label reads upon entering the installation. “This interactive exhibition asks you to confront the water and experience the void. No lifeguard on duty.”  

For Jordanna and Jenna, the installation poses a lot of questions to the viewer, especially if the viewer cannot swim. They ask, “what does a lack of swimming mean for our future in terms of Bahamian culture, in terms of our ecosystems, of our land and seascapes in times of climate change? How much longer will it be that most Bahamians can only see a coral reef or seagrass bed in videos instead of being able to experience them firsthand just outside their door? Can people genuinely appreciate something enough to protect it from over-development or pollution if they have not had the opportunity to engage with it in a positive way?” These are all questions that they posed in a write up about the piece.  

During the actual exhibition, floods of people took off their shoes and braved the water, getting their feet wet, posing for photos, and ultimately having fun in the water. Jordanna and Jenna were very pleased with the turnout; and they are hopeful that the experience the piece gave them will encourage more people to learn how to swim – or at least engage more thoughtfully with the water that surrounds these islands.    

The National Exhibition Eleven (NELEVEN) opened on 13 March 2025, and will be on view until 31 December 2025.