Bahamian Artist Blue Curry Presents Work At UK Culture Conference

Bahamian artist Blue Curry will be speaking about his work at the Contemporary Caribbean Visual Culture Conference with the theme “Artistic Visions of Global Citizenship” being held at the University of Birmingham this week, June 12th and 13th.

This conference aims to bring together academics, curators and creators to explore some of the key thematic priorities and political challenges which have begun to define Caribbean visual culture since the beginning of the twenty first century. The conference will address the cultural predicaments staged in the visual cultures of the English, Spanish, French and Dutch Caribbean.

It also seeks to address the way different versions of the Caribbean are created and recreated within contemporary US and European contexts. Contemporary Caribbean visual practices, through multiple, often disturbing mechanisms, continue to wrestle with the nation-diaspora polemic which was an important feature of various twentieth-century cultural and political agendas.

More importantly, however, they also propose new insights on questions of citizenship and new ways of interpreting globalization and trans-nationalism.

Additionally…

Blue Curry’s Work Featured In Scholarly Journal

The work of Bahamian artist Blue Curry is discussed by Spanish art critic, scholar, and researcher Carlos Garrido Castellano in his article ‘Conceptual Materialism: Installation Art and the Dismantling of Caribbean Historicism’ in the current issue of Third Text.

Castellano’s article analyses how Caribbean artists approach material culture in order to raise questions of historicism, knowledge and display. Installation artists Nikolai Noel (Trinidad and Tobago), Marcos Lora Read (Dominican Republic) and Blue Curry (Bahamas) approach sugar, kapok wood and sun cream from a materialist point of view in order to transcend referential values.

In so doing, they translate a critical concern to the life of the things and materials that have shaped the Caribbean past and present. By examining three of their most fully realized artistic projects, this article seeks to elaborate a reading of Caribbean art based on the re-staging through art of the political, economic and social implications arising from the entanglement between human beings and things.

Third Text has established its key position at the critical interface of contemporary art practice and theory with specific focus on the impact of ‘globalization’. In its twenty-six year history the journal has created an archive of knowledge production to benefit artists, researchers and art historians worldwide.

SIDE NOTE: Blue Curry was one of the original members of Popopstudios.