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Antonius Roberts’ Mabrika invites visitors into a suspended sea of silk cotton canoes, blending Lucayan ingenuity with Afro-Indigenous aesthetics to explore histories erased by colonization. This immersive installation envisions a pluralistic Caribbean futurism, where ecological and cultural pasts intersect with pressing questions about climate change, survival, and decolonization, offering a timeless meditation on progress and sovereignty.

Joining host, Amanda Coulson, on The Blank Canvas tonight are Tessa Whitehead, curator of the upcoming show at The D’Aguilar Art Foundation, entitled “Diversions” and participating artists Melissa Alcena and Sofia Whitehead.

By Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. The current exhibition at The Current Gallery & Art Center by Stan Burnside is yet another mesmerising moment in time.  Though we do not often think of slices of time, nor do we have the opportunity to enjoy those slices for their intense flavour and spicy complexity, we are far too busy trying to keep our heads above water, to enjoy the aesthetics of life.  This is perhaps something that we overlook in our day to day grind and being ground, but in taking a few moments to explore Burnside’s most recent show at Baha Mar, and the first one to be held publicly in ages, (Burnside usually exhibits in his own space). I would like to connect his complexity with the Creative Time Summit that is based in New York and streamed online on Friday, November 15th, at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. It is an opportunity to image futures differently.  I want to pivot between Burnside’s ‘Ashanti Tow/A Shanty Town’ (2019 120 x 60” Acrylic on Canvas) and ‘Glyphing decolonial love through urban flash mobbing and Walking with our Sisters’, by Karyn Recollect. Her work offers ways of reading flash mobs in Toronto’s urban centre and their spatial taggings of possibility in what Recollect refers to as “creative acts of indigenous solidarity”.  In Burnside’s work, can we explore the image as a spatial tagging that reveals an indigenous solidarity?  Although not a flash mob, the space is a mob, or viewed as a mob.  The un-deconstructed frame sends a message of alterity that is, that I perceive, as overlooked in Burnside’s strongly masculine gaze and image.  The work is dark and abstract over a far more nuanced reading of spatial dynamics and the interstitial layering of historical presences or absent presences and total erasure.  Burnside’s work, though this may easily have not been his intention because, as a viewer, I can receive a work of art totally independently or decontextualised from how the artists intended to be viewed.  This is also more nuanced as we bring our own experiences to art and seeing that constantly individualises feelings and perceptions, which is so important in being human and in witnessing our truths.  Each of our truths are uniquely tied to lives that are differently lived.