CURATORIAL PRACTICE: CURATOR AND PRODUCER
Transparency and Opacity: Jacek J. Kolasiński and Edouard Duval-Carrié
Exhibition
UrbanGlass
April 12 - June 16, 2023
Caribbean poet, theorist, and scholar Edouard Glissant writes that “opacity” is the right of the subject not to be known and is a condition for a creolized and ethical world to emerge. This exhibition Transparency and Opacity brings together work by artists Jacek J. Kolasiński and Edouard Duval-Carrié that play with “light” to present gender, sexuality, religion, region, and nationality as always in transformation. Kolasiński presents parts of his ongoing Creole Archive (2015-present) that examines the connections between the dark-sinned, doleful Black Madonna of Częstochowa and the Haitian Vodou spirit Ezili Dantò, the patron saint of single mothers, lesbians, and those who identify as transgender and nonbinary and is known for her vengeance and rage. The Madonna is thought to have been brought to Haiti by Poles in the early 19th century. Through a wall of back-lit colorful plexi works, Duval-Carrié evokes Ezili Fréda, often connected to the glamour of pre-Hattian revolutionary mulattas. Fréda is the flamboyant Haitian African spirit of love, beauty, jewelry, dancing, luxury, and flowers. Both artists’ works point to the emancipatory quality of opacity in the face of histories of violence and subjugation of the Caribbean.
"Transparency and Opacity" is part of the "Forever Becoming" trilogy of shows at UrbanGlass (2023).
–Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Photos by Blaine Davis and the artist
