Nottingham Contemporary is presenting a major exhibition of Haitian art inspired by Vodou. Bringing together some 200 works by 40 artists from the 1940s to today, and drawing from leading collections from Haiti, North America and Europe, Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou will be one of the largest exhibitions of Haiti’s celebrated art ever held, and is unusual in presenting it in the context of a programme dedicated to international contemporary art. With few exceptions, the artists in the exhibition came from impoverished urban and rural backgrounds, and had minimal contact with the mainstream modern and contemporary art worlds. The beauty and imaginative power of their work reflects the richness of Haitian culture and history, while also contrasting with Haiti’s experience of, and reputation for, extreme poverty, political oppression and natural disaster. Kafou is curated by Alex Farquharson, Director of Nottingham Contemporary, and Leah Gordon, artist and curator of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. artes fine arts magazine

Vodou is a major source of imagery in Haitian art and Haitian art is often at its most visionary and inventive when referring to Vodou. It was this that attracted many of the Surrealists to Haitian art – André Breton, Maya Deren, Wifredo Lam and Michel Leiris, for example. Its influence gives rise to a kind of collective Surrealism. According to Haitian poet René Depestre “The whole of Haitian culture is imbued with a popular surrealism, manifested in the Vodou religion, in the plastic arts and in the different forms of being among the people of Haiti. In Haiti even the political history is marked by surrealism.” Around ninety percent of Haitians are thought to be Vodou believers. Vodou reflects historical experience in Haiti on a supernatural or cosmological level.

                                                                          Above: Celeur Jean Herard, Societe (2010), Courtesy of the artst.

Rooted in various West African beliefs, Vodou reflects the brutality of slavery (then called Saint-Dominque, under French rule in the 18th century, it was the richest colony in the world), Haiti’s extraordinary Revolution of 1791-1804, led by slaves and some people of color, resulted in freedom from colonial rule, and its convoluted and often tragic subsequent history. Some of its lwa, or spirits, are related to actual historical figures in the Revolution. After 1804, political and economic isolation by the great colonial world powers for the newly-formed Republic of Haiti—fueled by fears of the spread of slave emancipation—meant that Vodou was able to develop far more pervasively in Haiti than equivalent syncretic religions had elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Latin America. During the long history of its development during and after colonialism, Vodou absorbed traits of many other belief systems: Roman Catholicism, in particular; indigenous Taïno beliefs; Freemasonry; Islam; and European magic and folklore. It continues to pervade and draw influences from everyday life. Its charismatic pantheon of lwa are dedicated to all the major facets of experience—romantic love, war, sex, the dead, maternity, the ocean and agriculture, for example—and each lwa has his or her preferred abode, attire, gesture, colour, pictogram (vévé), offering a counterpart Catholic saint. The exhibition itself is named after one of the lwa – Kafou is the spirit of the crossroads, the horizon at which the mortal and immortal worlds meet.

Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou will trace the history of how Vodou has been represented through successive generations of Haitian art in all four of Nottingham Contemporary’s galleries, including the work of artists who were also Vodou priests (Houngans): Hector Hyppolite, André Pierre and Lafortune Félix for example. The exhibition begins with what has been dubbed the ‘Haitian Renaissance’, exemplified by the artists that gathered around the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, founded in 1944, which brought Haitian art to the attention of international collectors and important cultural figures. Kafou represents key figures from this ‘first’ generation, including Hyppolite, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, Castera Bazille, Préfète Duffaut (who lived in Jacmel in the south), and Philomé Obin and Seneque Obin, founders of the distinctive Cap Haitian school in the north of Haiti. Hyppolite, Haiti’s most celebrated artist, is represented by a large number of major works from the 1940s. They are followed by distinctive artists who followed in their wake, such as André Pierre, Celestin Faustin, Gerard Valcin, Alexandre Grégoire and Lafortune Félix, while a third room brings together examples of artists associated with the Saint Soleil movement of the `70s, `80s and `90s, whose representations of the lwa are less specific, more ethereal, and sometimes verging on abstraction. A fourth section presents several recent developments, including the Atis Rezistans group, who make arresting supernatural assemblages from recycled materials (car parts, clothing, human skulls and bones) and carved wood from their downtown neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince; the baroque and visionary depictions of Vodou spirits in sequins on flags by Myrlande Constant and Edouard Duval-Carrié’s and Frantz Zephirin’s potent fusions of Vodou and Haitian political history.

Right: Andre Eugene, Les Deux Erzuli (Avec un bebe’ deux tets), 2010.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue whose texts will re-evaluate the significance of seventy years of Haitian art from various cultural and historical vantage points. It features new essays by Colin Dayan (author of the seminal ‘Haiti, History and the Gods’), Alex Farquharson and a ‘trialogue’ by Leah Gordon, Wendy Asquith and Katherine Smith. A major international conference at Nottingham Contemporary will complement the exhibition, considering the many ‘Afterlives’ of the 1804 Revolution in Haiti and the Atlantic World through a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.

Alex Farquharson, Director of Nottingham Contemporary, commenting on the exhibit said, “Haiti has produced a phenomenal number of inspired artists, most of whom had little or no access to formal education and lived, and continue to live, in great poverty. While Haitian art is much admired in folk art contexts, and has occasionally entered major modern art museums, it is still very rare to see it presented in the context of an international contemporary art programme like Nottingham Contemporary. We look forward to giving British audiences the opportunity of discovering for themselves a wide cross-section of this extraordinary art and to see it in relation to fascinating current debates around the culture and history of Haiti. We think the exhibition will be a revelation to contemporary artists today and we hope that it will help raise the profile of Haitian art in the art world in general.”

Leah Gordon, co-curator of the exhibition said, “Haiti, as a nation, uses every cultural means to transmit its history in forms that are charged, performative, poetic and surreal. The unique works of its painters, sculptors and flag makers in Kafou epitomise a visionary retelling of a history, which was as brutal as it was radical and victorious. It is a political act when people keep hold of their own traditions, their own creativity and their own history for their own class. What I feel we have partially lost in the U.K., with broadcast entertainment and rampant consumerism’s tendency to dilute history, I still find in Haiti—a nation tirelessly binding their history into sculptures, paintings, novels, poems, song, ritual and costume. And it is these political instincts that keep me returning there.”

Gordon is a photographer, filmmaker and curator who first visited Haiti in 1991. Her photography book ‘Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti’ was published in June 2010. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make ‘Freedom Sculpture’, a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Gordon organised and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in December 2009 and 2011. She was the adjunct curator for the first Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and is on the curatorial team for the major US show of Haitian art, ‘In Extremis’ at Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles.

Alex Farquharson, exhibit curator, has been Director of Nottingham Contemporary since 2007. Besides curating or co-curating ‘Star City’, ‘Uneven Geographies’, ‘The Impossible Prison’, and ‘Jean Genet’ at Nottingham Contemporary, he curated ‘If Everybody had an Ocean’ at CAPC Bordeaux and Tate St Ives 2006-7, co-curated ‘Le Voyage Interieur’ at Espace Electra in Paris 2005, and co-curated British Art Show 6 at Baltic in Newcastle and further venues in Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol, 2005-6. He has written widely on contemporary art and curating for leading art magazines and for other publications, and taught on the Curating Contemporary Art MA at Royal College of Art for several years.

Edited by Richard Friswell, ARTES Managing Editor

About Nottingham Contemporary

Nottingham Contemporary (right) opened in 2009 -a building of Caruso St John design in the centre of the city -is one of the UK’s leading and largest centres for contemporary art. Solo exhibitions held there include David Hockney (1960 – 68) and Frances Stark, Diane Arbus and Gert & Uwe Tobias, Huang Yong Ping and Wael Shawky, Anne Collier and Jack Goldstein, Marc-Camille Chaimowicz and Alberto Giacometti, Klaus Weber, Thomas Demand and Decolonizing Architecture, Mika Rottenberg and James Gillray, Francis Upritchard and Alfred Kubin. Nottingham Contemporary is also known for producing ambitious group exhibitions such as Star City: the Future under Communism; Uneven Geographies: Art and Globalization and Jean Genet Act 2. Nottingham Contemporary is an artistic and educational charity that welcomes everyone. Over half a million visited in our first two years.

Visit Nottingham Contemporary at: http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/

Or plan to refister on-line and attend the International Conference: 1804 & Its Afterlives

7 Dec 2012 – 08 Dec 2012-11-01

1804 & Its Afterlives brings together international speakers whose path-breaking studies have challenged previous orthodoxies about the Haitian Revolution, its local and international repercussions, and its afterlives as inspiration for critical thought, cultural production and political change.

Speakers include Colin (aka Joan) Dayan, Barbara Browning, Michael Largey, Dick Geary, Ada Ferrer, Martin Munro, Millery Polyné, Matthew J Smith, Nick Nesbitt. Supported by the University of Nottingham Institute for the Study of Slavery.

Left: Hector Hyppolite,  Henry Christophe (1947), Collection Musee Nader, Port-au-Prince, Haiti