Editorial: A Sudden & Violent Change
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There’s an art exhibition that takes place every March in Nassau, Transforming Spaces. It’s not like any other exhibition the rest of the year long. It’s a collaboration between artists and galleries, and for one weekend an art patron can visit up to twelve galleries in a single day. You board a bus at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, an art tour guide—an artist, a curator, or sometimes a collector—accompanies you on the tour, which involves food, wine, music sometimes, and, always, art.
This March, at the Hub, one of the funkier venues on the tour, extended the collaboration further. For their exhibition, they pulled together ten writers and ten artists. The writers were asked to write or choose pieces which fit a specific theme, and when they had finished, the pieces were passed on to the artists, who then used them as inspiration for pieces of their own. The finished product: an exhibition as exciting and dynamic as the idea that created it.
The theme for the exhibition was “A Sudden and Violent Change”. I won’t say much more about it; I’ll let the co-curators talk about it in their own words. Transforming Spaces was followed by two artists’ talks at the Hub, a reading at which the writers read and presented their pieces, and a talk-back where the artists explained their own processes and inspiration. Throughout the entire exhibition, handmade chapbooks containing the writing and the art were for sale.
The energy generated from the exhibition was too good to let pass. tongues of the ocean approached the co-curators with the offer to continue the exhibition in cyberspace—an extension, if you will, of the collaborative spirit. And so this issue of tongues of the ocean is built around A Sudden & Violent Change.
We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting together.
And now, words from the co-curators:
Nicolette Bethel
June 2010
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tongues of the ocean 