Posted: July 14th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events - Pedro Lasch, Exhibitions-Pedro Lasch, Haiti | No Comments »
TELEGETO (PT 1)
Morpeth School, Portman Place (off Globe Road), London E2 OPX
An exhibition of video works by young people from the Grand Rue area of Port-
au-Prince, Haiti and sculptures made by pupils from Morpeth School under the
guidance of artists from Atis Rezistans, Haiti.
Curated by John Cussans
EXHIBITION July 16th - 20th
OPENING (with Pedro Lasch) Thursday, July 16th, 4pm - 8 pm
Opening times Thu. - Fri. 4 - 7 pm, Sat. 1- 6pm
To learn more about Portman Gallery and Morpeth School, visit:
Posted: July 1st, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Exhibitions-Recommended, Haiti | No Comments »
LEAH GORDON
(b. 1959 Ellesmere Port)
‘The Invisibles’
Monday 5 July - Saturday 10 September
Download 300dpi image for press and online use
Click here to download book
Download Leah Gordon biography
Leah Gordon (b.1959 Ellesmere Port) is a photographer, film-maker and curator who has an ongoing interest in and relationship with Haiti. She first visited Haiti in 1991 and was the official photographer for the 1994 Amnesty International Report on that country. She has exhibited widely, her images featuring in numerous public and private collections including that of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Gordon has been involved in a range of projects as both visual artist and curator, including documenting experiences of homophobia in London, crossing-dressing in Vodou, links between the Slave Trade and the River Thames and exhibitions of Haitian art. Her photography book ‘Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti’ is published in June 2010.
The cover image to the Riflemaker exhibition The Invisibles: ‘Girl with Bird’, Cité Soleil, Haiti 1993, documents a territory - Cité de Soleil - classified by the UN as the most dangerous place on earth, though the image is a portrait of stillness and grace, taken during the military coup years of 1991-1994.
Gordon has recently returned to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. Her upcoming exhibition and book ‘The Invisibles’ will include photographs sold to benefit victims of the disaster. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make ‘Freedom Sculpture’, a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Continuing her relationship with the Grand Rue artists, Gordon organised and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in December 2009. Gordon also teaches fact-based film at The University for Creative Arts, Surrey. She participated in the Riflemaker exhibition ‘Voo-doo’ in 2009
“I’m drawn to the boundaries between art, religion and anthropology. These borderlands have a historical, and often uncomfortable, relationship with photography. A suspicion that photography has observed and policed, but never taken part. Photography has rarely been embraced as a form of representation by religions. It is as if photography, with it’s indelible relationship to the material, could only serve to disprove the divine, Although when one reflects on its alchemical past it seems rooted in magical process.
Much of my studio photography is an exploration of this, often surreal, territory. My portraits in the studio are staged examinations of the spirit world; an anthropology of the invisibles. ‘Kanaval’ is a body of my work that has a more documentary approach. A record of people that still own and transmit their own folk history. It is a unsanitised, dirty history of the people played out on the streets”. Leah Gordon.
“People originated by magic in all countries of the world. No one lives of the flesh. Everyone lives of the spirit”: Andre Pierre, Haitian artist, quoted in ‘The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou’, ed. Don Cosentino, UCLA Fowler Museum.
“Leah Gordon’s images seem to speak not only to the eye and mind, but somewhere deeper. They almost speak to the soul itself, to the long buried core of our human experience. As we peek into this powerful world, we see mankind turned inside out; the monster within worn proudly on the flesh, exposed, named and challenged. I think I will return over and over again to these images - they are a startling reminder of what lies beneath. Truly startling. Truly brilliant”. Emma Rice
Emma Rice is the Artistic Director of the Kneehigh Theatre where she has directed shows including ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, ‘Cymbeline’, ‘Tristan & Yseult’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.
© RIFLEMAKER 2004 | 79 BEAK STREET, REGENT STREET, LONDON W1F 9SU | info@riflemaker.org
TEL: 020 7439 0000
http://www.riflemaker.org
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Haiti, Writing On The Wall | 1 Comment »
Added On March 7, 2010
CNN’s David McKenzie follows a Haitian graffiti artist to see what he’s doing in his country post earthquake.
See video at:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/03/07/mckenzie.haiti.graffiti.champ.cnn?iref=allsearch
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Haiti, Writing On The Wall | No Comments »
See Jerry Rosembert in ‘Voices of Haiti’ (scroll down to Day 10)
http://voicesofhaiti.com/photos
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Haiti, Writing On The Wall | No Comments »
See Jerry Rosembert on ‘Mon JT Quotidien’ web TV episode:
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Articles, Haiti | 2 Comments »
Justice for Haiti: Beyond Aid and Debt Forgiveness
by COHA Research Associate Ethan Katz and Visiting Scholar Daniel Boscov-Ellen
Over the last few months there has been a surfeit of talk in the international community over what should be done for Haiti. However, in almost all of these discussions Haiti’s historical context is completely excised – it is almost as if the country had only come into being as a result of January’s earthquake. This collective amnesia is damning. The hurricanes of 2008 and the recent earthquake brought unfathomable damage upon Haiti, but their effects have been greatly exacerbated by Haiti’s widespread poverty, lack of adequate public infrastructure, food insecurity and an utterly bleak horizon. Unlike the hurricanes and earthquake, these are not natural phenomena. The devastating nature of these natural disasters cannot be understood apart from over two centuries of Haiti’s colonial and postcolonial subjugation, foreign occupation, economic exploitation and the degrading conditions faced by most of its population.
If one chooses wisely (and not selectively), one can learn from Haiti’s history in order to assure that this cycle of oppression, destitution, and destruction is not repeated. As a first step, providing Haiti with unconditional disaster relief on an urgent basis remains critical. However, so long as the developed countries that played such a significant role in creating Haiti’s present ruinous political and economic conditions continue to ignore and evade their responsibility for Haiti’s impoverishment, the country will remain vulnerable. Recognition of and restitution for past wrongs, coupled with an authentic commitment to end the sabotage and exploitation of this tortured nation, would be the best way to help Haiti achieve the stability and freedom to determine its own future.
Regrettably, such a recognition rarely can be found in the mainstream reporting on Haiti’s situation. In the words of Noam Chomsky, “the facts are extensively documented, appalling, and shameful. And they are deemed irrelevant for the usual reasons: they do not conform to the required self-image, and so are efficiently dispatched deep into the memory hole…” However, if we are to talk in good faith about what must be done for Haiti, we must first confront what we already have rendered there.
Continue reading at…
http://www.coha.org/justice-for-haiti-beyond-aid-and-debt-forgiveness/
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Articles, Haiti | No Comments »
Bill Clinton’s Heavy Hand on Haiti’s Vulnerable Agricultural Economy: The American Rice Scandal
by COHA Research Associate Leah Chavla
Did President Clinton and other recent White House tenants condemn Haiti to a future of endemic poverty through a self-serving U.S. rice export policy? An examination of Haiti’s economic liberalization strategies of the 1980s and 1990s indicates that the answer in part is “yes.”
continue reading at…
http://www.coha.org/haiti-research-file-neoliberalism’s-heavy-hand-on-haiti’s-vulnerable-agricultural-economy-the-american-rice-scandal/
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Events-Recommended, Haiti | 1 Comment »
Duke University
East Duke Building and Richard White Lecture Hall, East Campus
Thursday, April 22: Two Centuries of Haiti’s History
1-2:30 p.m.: Haiti’s Foundations(East Duke Parlors)
Julia Gaffield,Duke University-“Negotiating Independence: Haiti and the International Atlantic Community, 1803-1807”
Deborah Jenson, Duke University - “Dessalines’s America”
Watson Denis,Université d’Etat d’Haiti -“Haiti, History, and Historiography during the XIXth Century: Independence, Nationalism, and Modernization.”
3:00-4:30 p.m.: The 20th and 21stCenturies(Richard White Lecture Hall 107)
Kate Ramsey, University of Miami -“The Uses of Vodou: Historical and Post-Earthquake Reflections”
Chantalle Verna, Florida International University- “‘The situation is up to the Haitians’: Visions of National Development in Haiti’s Post- U.S. Occupation Period”
Matthew Jordan Smith, University of the West Indies, Mona -“Another Port-au-Prince is Possible: Being Present to the History and Future of Haiti’s Capital.”
5:00 p.m. Reading by Lyonel Trouillot(Richard White Lecture Hall 107)
Friday, April 23: The Future of the Past in Haiti
1:30-4:30p.m. (with coffee break) : Reconstructing Archives, Libraries and Universities in Haiti(Nelson Music Room 204)
Watson Denis,Université d’Etat d’Haïti -“State University of Haiti after the Earthquake 2010: Problems and Perspectives.”
Brooke Wooldridge, Coordinator,Digital Library of the Caribbean- “The Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative: Preserving Patrimony while Respecting Local Sovereignty”
Patrick Tardieu, Head Archivist, Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit -“The Past and Future of Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit”
Ted Widmer, Director, John Carter Brown Library - “SavingHaiti’s Libraries”
Sponsored by the Center for French and Francophone Studies, the Office of the President, The Office of the Provost, the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Duke University Libraries.
Visithttp://blogs-dev.oit.duke.edu/globalfrancefor more information
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events, Events-Recommended, Haiti | 1 Comment »
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Thursday 03.18.10
A Haiti Screening & Conversation w/ Port-Au-Prince artist André Eugene & Others / Screening of ‘Atis Rezistans, The Sculptors of the Grand Rue’
CONTENTS:
1. About this Thursday
2. About our guests: Port-Au-Prince based artist André Eugene, Laura Heyman, and Richard Fleming
3. About Leah Gordon’s film ‘Atis Rezistans, The Sculptors of the Grand Rue’
4. About the Ghetto Biennale: A Salon des Refusés for the 21st century (November-December 2009)
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1. About this Thursday
What: Haiti Screening & Conversation w/ Port-Au-Prince artist André Eugene & Others
When: Thursday 03.18.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:30 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This Thursday we will have a very special event with Port-Au-Prince based artist André Eugene, who is in New York for a few days during an exceptional visit. After screening oLeah Gordon’s
‘Atis-Rezistans: The Sculptors of Grand Rue’ (34mins), André Eugene, and our other guests Laura Heyman, and Richard Fleming, will answer questions or comments in a general conversation about art and politics in Port-Au-Prince, the recent Ghetto Biennale that happened there, and the aftermath of the tragic earthquake, and the prospects for the future.
We are keeping to 16 Beaver’s tradition of not charging anything for this event (our events are always free), a hat will be circulated for those who want to help with contributions for the Grand Rue community, as André Eugene will be flying back directly to Haiti, and is specifically in New York to buy tents for people who have no shelter for the coming rain season.
The evening is an opportunity to have a group conversation with everyone in New York who knows and cares about Haiti, or art, politics, and international resistance struggles. Please forward and post to your lists.
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2. About Port-Au-Prince based artist André Eugene, Laura Heyman, and Richard Fleming
André Eugene Andre Eugène is the progenitor of the Grand Rue artist movement in downtown Port au Prince. He fuses the fetish effigy with an apocalyptic futuristic vision. Much of his work is figurative using human skulls for heads and imbued with a bold sense of irony, sexuality and humor. To learn more on him and the Grand Rue artists, see below text and link (3).
British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon first visited Haiti in 1991 and has built an extraordinary body of work over nineteen years. Her work does not merely articulate nostalgia for an authentic popular culture but positively celebrates the vivid potential of contemporary communal creativity in Haiti.
Richard Fleming is a writer and journalist with experience in Haiti. He is the author of ‘Walking to Guantánamo’: ( http://www.walkingtoguantanamo.com/Front.html ). You can learn more about his work at his blog:
http://antarcticiana.blogspot.com/
Laura Heyman is an educator, photographer, artist and curator. She was a participant in last December’s ‘Ghetto Biennale’ in Port-Au-Prince and will speak of her work and experience there.
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3. About Leah Gordon’s film ‘Atis Rezistans, The Sculptors of the Grand Rue’
The Grand Rue Sculptors are a community of artists living in a downtown slum neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This is the newest art community to have emerged in the last ten years. They 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.
To read texts, and see images of works about the Grand Rue, and its artists, visit:
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4. About the Ghetto Biennale: A Salon des Refusés for the 21st century (November-December 2009)
Please visit the Ghetto Biennale website for full information on participants, history, ideas, etc. The following text is just an introduction.
http://www.ghettobiennale.com/
(below already happened, but written in present//future tense)
What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?
In 2009 the ‘Sculptors of Grand Rue’ plan to hold their first ‘Ghetto Biennale’. They are inviting fine artists, filmmakers, academics, photographers, musicians, architects and writers, to come to the Grand Rue area of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, to make or witness work that will be shown or happen, in their neighbourhood. In the words of the writer John Keiffer it will hopefully be a “’third space’…an event or moment created through a collaboration between artists from radically different backgrounds”. ’
‘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.’Professor Donald Cosentino, World Arts and Cultures, University of California-Los Angeles.
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.’
Malaysian artist, Simryn Gill, has said of her potential involvement in the ‘Ghetto Biennale’.'The making of things, in the way that you describe Haitian artists doing, is very energising and attracting for me. Sometime it feels like we have left so behind us the acts of actually making, forming, transforming materials with passion and courage, and art has become a kind of domain of cleverness, even timidity, in case we somehow show ourselves up in too much eagerness or insufficient wit or skill by making forms.’
Kathy Acker, Andre Breton, Maya Deren, Katherine Dunham, Graham Greene, Jerzy Grotowski, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, & Genesis P.Orridge have all visited Haiti and made work inspired by their visit.
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16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th / 5th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry
