Un|Fixed Homeland, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, 2016 Catalog: Un|Fixed Homeland | Page 52

commonwealth countries, and full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many ambitious dreamers took advantage of the 1948 Act and began making their way to England, becoming part of what was known as the“ Windrush Generation”( the first significant group of Caribbean immigrants to arrive in Britain in the 1950s).
At the time, there was no university in the colony. A desire for professional and economic advancement inevitably meant emigration. The early 1950s would become a period rife with intense political unrest as the movement towards gaining independence became more forceful. In April, 1953 the colony had undergone its first democratic election and yet it would take another thirteen volatile years, marked by highly oppressive policies by the elected government, before gaining independence in 1966. Many did not wait and orchestrated their own independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, another movement of emigration unfolded as Guyanese began shifting to Canada and the United States. In fact, by 2001, Toronto emerged as a prominent node in the Caribbean diaspora as one of the largest and oldest Guyanese populations outside of Guyana. Similarly, in New York City, Guyanese immigrants make up the city’ s fifth largest immigrant population.
through their parents’ migration narratives. These thirteen artists reflect the reality of the country’ s diaspora; artists working in Guyana, as well as those living in five metropolitan cities— Boston, Los Angeles, New York, London, and Toronto. Together, they bring to bear diverse and inter-generational perspectives of Guyanese experiences of migration.
Yet, the exhibition does not rest solely on artists gazing back from an outsider distance. It is instead a dynamic exploration of the artists’ encounters, departures, returns, absences, and reunions. Un | Fixed Homeland also examines the other side of the spectrum of the migration story, and perhaps one of the more lesser told narratives— the points of view of those who are left behind. Like my family who made frequent trips to the airport to bid farewell to loved ones, the Guyanese citizen is a witness to constant acts of emigration— friends and family leaving for“ another land, for gain and training … good dollars and education,” as the artist Kwesi Abbensetts poignantly puts it. With an intimate understanding of this liminal space of leaving and returning, through their work the artists represent the ones who leave and the ones who are left.
27