Everything Slackens in a Wreck

Abstract

This is a curatorial essay in which the author explains his research and process for the conception and production of everything slackens in a wreck, a visual arts exhibition running at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York from June to September 2022. Gosine elaborates his thinking about the title of the exhibition, which is taken from a Khal Torabully poem, and explains the relevance of and his intrigue with the four artists whose works comprise the exhibition: Wendy Nanan (Trinidad and Tobago), Margaret Chen (Jamaica/Canada), Andrea Chung (Jamaica/United States), and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Guadeloupe). Each of the four women is a descendant of indentured workers who traveled to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and for each this history is a reference point in her practice. Gosine proposes a consideration of the Americas as a consequence of three wreckages: the ship landings of European colonizers and the arriving ships of enslaved and, later, indentured peoples.