Featuring artists Sandra Brewster, Ésery Mondesir, and Farihah Aliyah Shah in dialogue with moderator Starasea Camara, this panel discussion will explore themes and issues raised in Kept Alive Within Us, a group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph curated by Sally Frater that explores various rituals related to the everyday and the natural environment through art by those who hold cultural ties to the Caribbean.

Drawing its title from Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, the installation explores how ancestral ontological ways of knowing emerge throughout daily domestic actions and encounters with the natural world. At a moment when the Caribbean is under threat as a result of climate change and global warming, KAWU illustrates how encounters in domestic, gastronomical, ecological, and spatial realms constitute ongoing acts of remembrance and resistance.

This is a free event and open to the public. A reception will follow the panel discussion.

Image detail: Deborah Jack, When the evidence of our wounds were reborn as petals: Evidence #20 (detail), 2009, 36” x 36″, film still. Courtesy of the artist