UPDATE: The exhibition has been extended until Saturday 30 April 2022
BODIES OF MEMORY, an interactive installation by dance artist and filmmaker Sonja Dumas, which navigates feelings about the Middle Passage, its effect on the body and its influence on the history of movement culture in Trinidad and Tobago, is currently open to the public. at the Medulla Art Gallery, Port of Spain, until April 30.
The work is part of the artist’s research for her PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine. According to Dumas: “This installation is an investigation into my current investigations into the bodies of water that fueled the very evolution of race, status and what it means to be Caribbean.
“I want to examine their influences on how we move and why.”
It is an immersive, interactive space to navigate feelings about the Middle Passage and its effect on the body.
The immersive installation is the first solo exhibition for Dumas. ‘It was quite scary. I had to think about the space in a different way than I approached it as a dancer or choreographer, but still provide that sense of ebb and flow – of both the work and the story.
Many people suffered in the Middle Passage, but there is a sustaining and sustaining of body, mind and spirit that has lived through the generations, and that is what interests me.
What was approved and retained and why? How do we represent and carry that history in our bodies today?’
There will also be a free art talk on Friday at 7pm at the gallery, 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook. Dumas will be interviewed by leading Caribbean culture analyst and development specialist Dr Marielle Barrow, who will be online in the live space.
