National Exhibition 8

Looking at the institution’s mandate and acknowledging our surrounding environment and creative ecology, it was imperative to move outside the walls and develop collaborative partnerships. This expansion of the National Exhibition will secure another safe and neutral space, Hillside House, allowing for more diverse works and programming to be produced thereby increasing the visibility and viability of ongoing practices.

The biennial National Exhibition stands apart as a laboratory—a site where artists, researchers, writers, and educators can question, interrogate, and develop ideas about their current concerns, while witnessing and paying testament to complex global dynamics. For the National Exhibition 8, we want to explore the institution’s catalytic role in navigating societal configurations that take into consideration cultural and social paradigm shifts, the impact of globalization, along with the changing status of nationhood in The Bahamas and its wider citizenry.

Treating the NE as an environ, an organic entity with its various forms and traces, it engages with multiple narrative devices in relation to artistic production and practices of thought with a handle on current realities, specifically addressing gender equality, postcolonial concerns, feminism, blackness, the myth of independence, and the crisis of nationhood.

We are also thrilled to be introducing the inaugural National Exhibition Researcher-in-Residence Hilary Booker. The US-based scholar will present “The Moonflower Room” which combines the intellectual and creative lineage from which Booker developed her theoretical framework with research findings about interview participants’ hopes and dreams for the future. This will include an edible cartography composed of plant-based foods that she will prepare from primarily locally-produced ingredients and a radical library of books and bushes. By placing books, bushes and plant-based foods together, Booker hopes to demonstrate that plants, land, oceans and foods are their own sets of knowledge critical to development whose essences are best experienced and expressed viscerally.

The National Exhibition 8 is curated by Holly Bynoe.