Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The first published material after the collaboration between Videobrasil and ARC Magazine, the article below presents to Brazilian and international public a panorama of the most recent edition of New Media, festival dedicated to showcasing Caribbean practices ranging from video art, sound art, interactive installations and experimental film. The text was adapted from the original article published in ARC's 6th edition, in which crucial subjects and works included in the festival are analysed. This year, New Media will occur from September 23 to 28 at Medulla Art Gallery, Trinidad and Tobago. An open call for artists accepts submissions until May 31 (click here to learn more).

For a second year the trinidad+tobago film festival is partnered with ARC Magazine to present New Media, a selection of works that exclusively featured avant-garde video and film art emerging from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Generally, film festivals in the Caribbean have focused on documentary and traditional narrative films, whereas experimental or non-traditional video art and film has been less easily understood and recognized; thus, putting a spotlight on this art form is both welcome and necessary. “New Media is a term that is used to signify the way that technology is changing and challenging our modes of representation,” noted Holly Bynoe, curator of the 2011 rendition at Medulla Art Gallery. In September 2012, the work of 33 artists were showcased in a collection of 48 experimental pieces, exposing a wide range of installations that are linked by the universal language of filmic expression. They utilize Caribbean-related ideas and themes, while being diverse in their content.

New media is a term that has been applied to a wide range of technological innovations such as the Internet, social media networks, and virtual and interactive reality. With respect to artistic work, it is used to define art that incorporates various elements of technology in its aesthetics and presentation. In this particular exhibition, New Media was embodied in multiple video installations that push and at times dissolve the boundaries between recorded abstract visual art and prescriptive storytelling.

New Media, in whichever form it takes, has in fact existed in the Caribbean landscape for a considerable time. It sparked a strong debate in Jamaica in 1999 as to its influence on the future of the country’s art when David Boxer challenged the national norm with his collages, assemblages and installations. In Trinidad and Tobago, it has been a source of Christopher Cozier’s questioning of what art should and can be and how we determine what it is. It has also been a framework for practicing artists in the diaspora, such as British filmmaker Steve McQueen (of Grenadian descent) whose early experimentation with video installation won him the Turner Prize in 1999 and gained him the reputation of being one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. He has gone on to direct the award-winning feature length films Hunger (2008) and Shame (2012). However we choose to define it, New Media is being incorporated into visual articulations and experienced by a larger public at film festivals across the region.

Ryan Oduber, Kima Momo 58 (2012) | video still, courtesy of Dwayne Heronimo

Carnival in the Caribbean is the festival of the flesh, a way to burn off excesses in preparation for the season of repentance and denial during Lent. Aruba illustrates this final sloughing by the burning of the straw figures of King Momo and Momito at the close of their carnival celebrations. One of the central pieces to last year’s exhibition is Ryan Oduber’s take on this theme in the realization of Kima Momo 58, which displays the carnivalesque and bacchanalia aspects of Caribbean culture through its humour. It also grapples with more serious issues of race, colonialism, machismo and the dangers of absolute power. The main characters are the King and Queen of Carnival, who rule over their court of revellers. As they both inspect the court, they adjust and poke their minions to be more presentable, mannerly and festive. The Queen sometimes laughs as she pushes and prods; the King is calculating and reserved.

The seminal scene in Kima Momo 58 takes place at a feast, where excess and chaos centres. The rulers war over food and gifts with the selfish, the squabble escalating into an imminent struggle between man and woman where the machismo within Caribbean societies reveals its underbelly. The Queen is offered up by her ‘prince’ as a sacrifice to the court she ruled. This ceremonious drama moves from the heavily decorated court to the beach where she is dragged bare foot and tiara-less to the edge of the water, left to expire.

Patricia Kaersenhout, Wilhelmus Project (2010) | video still

Patricia Kaersenhout investigates her Surinamese heritage in relation to her upbringing in a Western European culture. Wilhelmus Project showcases an idiosyncratic interrogation of the Dutch National Anthem. Kaersenhout uses the anthem as the core of what she calls “a patchwork of cultural interpretations” embodied in a ‘rainbow’ choir that sings the anthem, while standing in the sea. The choir consists of six different nationalities and they are singing at The Hell’s Gate, a site of many sea battles in the 17th century. The Netherlands anthem incorporates bits and pieces of the Bible, the Koran, Arabic philosophy, Dutch poems and historical images. In this conflation the music is an arrangement that incorporates the anthem’s original melodies, music from Blaxploitation and the national anthem of Suriname.

Kaersenhout questions the final result of this newly constructed anthem in a deeply personal and symbolic way. What does it mean to be black and Dutch? How will this invisibility be transformed – the varied fragments that comprise the African diaspora – into the visible? What will this mean for a country that is changing its political affiliation from liberal to pre-conceived, prejudicial, right wing tendencies? As the members of the choir sing, and each type further explored, the footage is intercut with graphic representations of historical figures, newspaper cutouts, and popular imagery.

Haitian interdisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu works in a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography and video installations. New Media 2012 highlighted six works that share common themes, such as distortion of time and subjectivity, reality versus unreality and experimentations through juxtaposition and installation. In Evolution, Mathieu shows a formally composed diptych; a woman on the right explains tarot cards that are related to human spirituality; the readings are correlated to images of chimpanzees and human interactions on the left. This juxtaposition can be problematic to the general public because of the chimpanzee’s status as a controversial symbol within many peoples’ spirituality due to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

The sequence presents the tarot reader analysing card three, ‘The Empress’, while juxtaposed with the left side’s portrayal of a long row of cages, each containing animals with a lone human tending them. The pairing of images, words and the general mood work to imbue Evolution with quintessential questions of spirituality’s erosion in today’s society. Mathieu’s ability to link these theories with visual associations disrupts a conventional narrative and transcends the boundaries of linearity.

Andy Robert, Untitled (Eyes) (2011) | video still

Andy Robert is a Haitian interdisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles who seeks to question the boundaries of the human body and its limitations through various studies. Untitled (Eyes) documents a trash can being filled with water, affecting the sensorium of the viewer. Robert works with a keen understanding of deprivation, as images, sounds, and the viewer’s being are submerged within the container. The strategic positioning of the camera deep within the barrel offers one perspectival release where the subject controlling the trash can is the mediator and timekeeper of pace and place as the can moves position and disorients viewers.

Untitled (Eyes)’s chaotic fades echo from left to right, and at times it feels as if the viewer will be boiled out of existence, or be born into the world through this agony. Robert says that the work was inspired by the proliferation of media coverage on torture, dialogues around the practice of water boarding, and the violation of human rights taking place during the Bush administration. The position on which Robert places the viewer certainly gives one both empathy with the artist’s point of view and with the victims.

Olivia McGilChrist, Slow Dance (2012) | video still

Olivia McGilchrist’s provocative Slow Dance (2012) engages with the examination of popular culture, familial relationships, grief and nostalgia in its abundant 20 minutes. Slow Dance is dedicated to her father’s memory and seeks to recreate a bond through a looped dance sequence that shows a young girl in white mask dancing with an older man. They dance to ‘Going Out of My Head’, made famous by Little Anthony and the Imperials. These dances are separated by broadcast static which precedes a black screen that plays different songs to the contemplative and affecting silence.

From afar the girl appears to be innocuous, masked in innocence and indifference. However, there is a seething anger and disturbance present that is indicative of loss, grief and uncertainty. They come together and part, and at times appear as ghosts dancing next to each other, as reality is realized in harsh shadows on the wall. The periods of static that interrupt the dance indicate the discontinuity and foreshadows the final parting – death. Slow Dance challenges normative storytelling through its cyclic repetition of father and daughter locked together in dance while performing and presenting sentimental elements of nostalgia.

New Media 2012’s assembled collection challenged how we consider evolving art traditions and their proliferation. The use of varied themes and presentations by the Caribbean artists and their diasporic compatriots has shown that our artistic roots reach deep into our sensibilities and apply not only to our personal experiences and subjectivities, but also operate outside of stereotypical narratives and tropes of representations. The pieces range from the humorous, reflexive and contemplative, to the visceral realizations of sensory deprivation.

Most of all, New Media reveals that art is evolving from deep interrogations of the social, personal and political experiences, and that it is a viable and valuable avenue for its creators to reveal their true selves.

Source: ARC Magazine