By Natalie Willis
This week we continue our interview with Sonia Farmer on her work for the upcoming collaborative exhibition with the British Council, “We Suffer To Remain”. It is difficult to think about just who gets to discuss our history, when some voices are silenced, and others get a proverbial loudspeaker. Farmer’s artist book “A True & Exact History”, a poem produced from her erasure of Richard Ligon’s “A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes” (1657), deals with just that.
By Dr Ian Bethel Bennett. The materiality of art and culture is essential to the experience with art and our understanding of the relationship between space, time and humanity. When we do not see, feel or experience the materiality of space, we tend to ignore its existence. Art can be used to bridge gaps between the materiality of experience and the historical omissions and erasures that leave the space open to deletion, and de-historicisation. Music, similar to art, can speak to a similar materialising of experiences that have been wiped out by the passage of time and the shifting sands of spatial economic change. The disappearance from the mental record of the Nassau Market is a salient example of the vanishing materiality and so the memory of that experience. What remains is a space that has been razed of the material market and so the only vestiges remain. The artistic renderings and musical recitations of that material experience, where women and men walked over Market Street, often through Gregory’s Arch, to sell produce in the market, is what remains.
By Natalie Willis. We often speak of Slavery in regards to one demographic in particular and the detrimental effects that remain today – and rightly so. It is a painful legacy, but it is also a shared one. “The Slave’s Lament,” written by Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns in 1792, is a song that spoke to this history in its own time. It is also the title of a work by another Scot, Graham Fagen, who used this song in his presentation at the 2015 Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition. This newer rendition, featuring Reggae artist Ghetto Priest and a string ensemble, serves as the focus and starting point for us to begin to discuss this history through a slightly different lens. The exhibition, “We Suffer To Remain,” opens in March and features Fagen’s artwork along with that of three Bahamian artists, namely: Sonia Farmer, John Beadle, and Anina Major