ancestral: remains to be seen

For this eighth iteration of the Double Dutch exhibitions, Tamika Galanis and Rodell Warner investigate what archival photography means in the Caribbean space. Presented with the spirits of ancestors and silk-cotton trees who have born witness to the shifting physical and social landscapes in this space, Galanis and Warner give us room to question how the colonially manufactured view of our past as a region has shaped the ways in which we know – or, perhaps more importantly, don’t know – ourselves in the contemporary.

About the artists

Tamika Galanis (The Bahamas) is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist. A Bahamian native, Tamika’s work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns. Emphasizing the importance of Bahamian cultural identity for cultural preservation, Tamika documents aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics. Tamika’s photography-based practice includes traditional documentary work and new media abstractions of written, oral and archival histories. Tamika earned a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.

 Rodell Warner (b. 1986, Trinidad & Tobago) is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. His works have been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2016 Dreamlands exhibition as part of the collective video project Ways of Something, at The National Gallery of Jamaica in the 2016 exhibition Digital, and at the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018 in I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not #14. Rodell is a recipient of the 2011 Commonwealth Connections International Arts Residency and the 2014 summer residency at NLS Kingston. Warner was commissioned in 2017 to create the Davidoff Art Edition, a series of five artworks printed onto a limited edition of five thousand boxes of luxury cigars. Additionally, he presented and sold at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Miami, and Basel. Rodell lives and works between Port of Spain, Trinidad, Kingston, Jamaica, and Austin, Texas, U.S.A.