Deering Estate Arts Eleven Voices Exhibit Catalogue | Page 8

CURATOR’S STATEMENT
ROSIE GORDON-WALLACE
While there are several projects that trace the production of the Caribbean as a space to be
consumed, the conversation about Africa conjures mystery and vastness and tradition. So too did the
conversations of ELEVEN VOICES force me to think of place both here and there.
This was not an exhibition dissimilar to Erica James’s What is Africa to Me? mounted in the Bahamas
in 2006. Hers was a personal show that drew from the collection of Kay Crawford, an American living
in Nassau that started collecting African work, some South African, as well as East and West African.
“It’s a question of history and it’s a question of identity that is beyond race, and as a culture and a
country we need to have a conversation on Africa”. 1
ELEVEN VOICES aimed to incite a conversation about cultural struggles, memory, and identity
happening among contemporary artists. We hoped to have a conversation with African aesthetics,
perhaps materials and certainly with the politics, identity, culture, and the impact that Africa has had
on the Diaspora in Miami. “We have been mixing up race and culture in a certain way that needs to
be teased out”, says James, the then-director of the National Gallery of the Bahamas. What’s South
Africa to Miami? What historical influences, connections, contemporary possibilities, practices and
imaginaries, knowledge, cognition and social influences has the country had on us as immigrants?
Artists were invited to reconsider the practices, {borrowed} habits, proverbs, models, revisions, and
rhetoric of politics in contemporary art and curating. We conversed about themes of epistemic
practice, of cognition and social bond of power/knowledge, and of the influence of institutions on
societies there and here.
The collaboration between Kim Yantis and myself resulted in numerous conversations, first and
foremost- why South Africa? The basis for the country’s spotlight was perhaps a sentimental choice-
a fall exhibition complementing an annual thematic wine and food fundraiser, Wine on Harvest Moon.
Pushing past the lighter culinary presentation of wine, food, and culture showcased at this event,
we were given pause to solicit Miami artists exploring contested identity, terrain, and experience.
We wanted the exhibition to be authentic, featuring emerging voices and certainly works from South
African heritage. Our conversations were fueled by many current events in urban realities of our inner
city as well as dreamscapes for tourist consumption mirroring the conditions that triggered
discontent in South Africa.
A series of studio visits compelled Kim and I to feature artists like Rosa Naday Garmendia, whose
practice involves documenting and investigating race and police brutality. An ongoing project, Rituals
of Commemoration holds sacred space for black men fallen from police alteractions. Naday
Garmendia memorializes these lives in scaling installations of multi-colored bricks etched with their
names; reminding me of W.E. B. Dubois’ words about loss of those that “sometimes die before the
world has rightly gauged their brilliance”. 2
The personal is political. There is no place that embodies this more so than the sacred space of home.
Groana Melendez, in her photograph Laura Daydreaming, features a young woman longing for home
while surrounded by walls that hold her secrets. Antonius Roberts’ sculptures tell the tale of sacred
places (see his 2006 installation Sacred Space at Clifton Pier) 3 using the medium of wood to leave a
trail of lives lost during slavery. My own feeling of home – of loss and yearning – drew me to select
Anja Marais’s newly created video installation Unforeseen Snow/Onvoorsiene Sneeu, a study of