Abstract
Through a critical interpretation of “Caribe insular: Exclusion, fragmentacion y paraiso,” one of the major Caribbean art exhibitions showcased in the 1990s, this essay examines the spatial politics of Caribbean art curatorship taking place abroad. It argues that any understanding of the spatial politics regulating the display of Caribbean art outside the region has to be approached from an ambivalent point of view. In this case, this implies recognizing how “Caribe insular” was inscribed within two different logics: one linked to the regional panorama of democratic Spain, marked by the anxiety of reframing a “postcolonial” image of the country within an European context, and other attentive to the distance from essentialist and “identity-oriented” views of artistic practice that Caribbean creators were developing at the end of the decade. Being burdened by the first conditioning, “Caribe insular” sketched, nevertheless, a new conceptualization for the large-scale Caribbean art shows of the 2000s.
Highlights
The main interest of this essay is the representational politics of Caribbean art exhibitions developed within European cultural and curatorial scenarios
Caribbean but one of Spain in relation to its colonial past, and how the contradictions and conflicts of the Spanish cultural reality were captured in this productive curatorial process
The approach to the Caribbean elaborated by “Caribe Insular,” on the other hand, included many curatorial advances, attempting to move away from the contradictions of “identity-exhibitions” in order to complicate the locus of curatorship and to focus attention on the complexity of Caribbean reality and visual production
Summary
The main interest of this essay is the representational politics of Caribbean art exhibitions developed within European cultural and curatorial scenarios. It tried to give certain autonomy to artworks to free them from a single curatorial logic, encouraging experimental and nonlinear approaches to the exhibition display This objective, as we will see, was not fully achieved, the project presented substantial differences with respect to previous large-scale regional shows curated both inside and outside. “Caribe insular” aimed to ensure a space for aesthetics, putting into place a set of strategies of display and artistic appreciation that generated a negotiation with the Caribbean’s politics of space and perception It remained trapped within the contradictions derived from Spanish postcolonial anxieties of representation, categorization, and identification of Spain’s own past and present. Far from being a unique case, I will argue, the contradictions arising from those aspirations have shaped curatorial practices produced about the Caribbean region in heterogeneous ways
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