[Haiti-London-Konbit] Fwd: Haiti in London: Tonight, Saturday 20, 7:30 – 11pm please forward

[Haiti-London-Konbit]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <leahgordon at aol.com>
Date: 20 February 2010 09:00
Subject: Haiti in London: Tonight, Saturday 20, 7:30 – 11pm please forward
To: jcussans at gmail.com, lisacradduck at hotmail.com, jesse at bravenewwhat.org,
fionawhitty at gmail.com, annemcconnell at blueyonder.co.uk, sion at calverts.coop,
roger at dircon.co.uk, tracey at foundry.tv, jonathan at foundry.tv



Hello everybody

We would like to invite you to the following event:

Ghetto Biennale
Tonight, 7:30 – 11pm

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


 ---
  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/

--
The Island
basement, 96 Teesdale Street
London  E2 6PU
www.islandtheisland.org
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