The show, which opened last December at the same time than the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti, has been extended until the 28th February. The Island is delighted to show the last group of sculptures by Grand Rue sculptors Eugène, Celeur and Guyodo living and working in Port Au Prince.

The artist André Eugène will join us this evening, so the event will be an exciting opportunity to talk about his work.

Please find the details below and feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be interested. Thank you.

We hope to see you then.

The Island

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GHETTO  BIENNALE

Radical Relations (part III)

28/11/09  –  28/02/10

“What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?”

The Island is delighted to be the off-site partner of the first Ghetto Biennale of Haiti, using its venue to show recent works by Haitian artists André Eugène, Celeur Jean Hérard, Guyodo Klere and Claude Sentilus.

‘This is the newest art community to have emerged in the last ten years in a downtown slum neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The ‘Grand Rue Sculptors’ have produced art that reflects a heightened, Gibsonesque, Lo-Sci-Fi, dystopian view of their society, culture and religion, and have dragged Haitian art into the 21st century. Jean Herard Celeur, Andre Eugene and Guyodo are at the core of the movement, which contains seven or eight other younger artists, all producing powerful sculptural works.  Their work has opened entirely new vistas into the creative possibilities of the Vodou-inspired arts of Haiti. Their muscular sculptural collages of engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber transforms the detritus of a failing economy into deranged, post-apocalyptic totems’. (Leah Gordon)

Among the many existing curatorial models of art biennials all over the world, The Island project of presenting simultaneously the ‘Ghetto Biennale’ in London is directly related to the issues that give rise to the Biennale of Haiti itself, such as for Haitian artists to overcome the dual isolation of an island and of a ghetto.

Forging a successful arts career is difficult for a downtown Haitian. Refused US entry visas, the Grand Rue sculptors were excluded from a private view of their work in a major museum in Miami. A lack of government support makes them economically excluded from all major biennales. The artists have responded by hosting the ‘Ghetto Biennale’, the first arts festival located in a shantytown in the developing world. The event will explore what happens when artists from radically different backgrounds come together. When first world art objectives encounter third world artistic reality, and when Western artists try to make art in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haitian artist, Andre Eugene says, ‘the Ghetto Biennale represents positive change in my area and gives us the chance to show another face of life in the ghettos of Port-au-Prince. I think we have much to offer and much to learn.

‘The artists use all the detritus of a post-industrial global economy which uses Haiti as a dumping ground. They return the compliment, creating astounding bricolages and assemblages  which express both the despair and the seemingly endless creativity of Haiti and Vodou. I have visited their ateliers on Haiti’s Grand Rue on several occasions over the last four years. I have had a chance to see their sculptures as they were being wrought from their desperate materials in a scrap yard on this wreck of a street, in this wreck of a city, in this wreck of a country. Saying all that, I would also have to add that, like Haiti, their sculptures seem to express the boundless creative energy of a people who are simultaneously the economically poorest, and artistically richest culture in the New World.’ (Donald Cosentino).

The show at The Island aims to increase cultural diversity in the arts, and to offer the opportunity the UK public to see contemporary Haitian art, created within the social, political and spiritual context of Vodou, Haiti’s national religion -and a culture that was born and survives due to its history of accommodation and inclusion-.

The Ghetto Biennale is also the last of three exhibitions focusing on collaborative - relational practices, designed as a single project, which has been running at The Island over the period between September 2009 and January 2010. The three exhibitions, collectively named Radical Relations may be associated to one another for their similar process of describing a tension between actions and movements of affinity and distance.

For more information visit http://www.ghettobiennale.com/
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The Island
basement, 96 Teesdale Street
London  E2 6PU
www.islandtheisland.org