Negotiating Haiti in the Western Imaginary

On Tuesday 22nd November we had a very engaging artists talk from Leah Gordon, a multi-media artist who curates, collects, researches, writes and directs. She works across a variety of media including film, photography and installations, often including commissioned sculpture and painting. 

-->

Haiti has become a repository for a number of visual archetypes which are interminably replicated, produced and reproduced, and have become servants of a variety of Western economic and geo-political agendas. Leah has over twenty years experience of photography in Haiti, and previous to her current practice as an artist and curator, has worked as a commercial photographer for international aid agencies/NGOs and the Western media. She gave a really engaging and thought provoking talk about the shifting and evolving visual agendas, many of them contradictory, deployed in visioning and commodifying Haiti. She discussed her contemporary practice in Haiti and the strategies and mechanisms she adopts to attempt to avoid and subvert the encoded visual mythologies of Haiti.

Leah makes work on Modernism and architecture; the slave trade and industrialisation; and grassroots religious, class and folk histories. In the 1980's she wrote lyrics, sang and played for the feminist folk punk band, 'The Doonicans'. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale; the National Portrait Gallery, UK; Parc de la Villette, Paris and NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale. Her photography book 'Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti' was published in June 2010. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; on the curatorial team for ‘In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art’ at the Fowler Museum, UCLA and was the guest curator for the 2016 NYC Outsider Art Fair. In 2015, Leah Gordon was the recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean.