Posted on April 1, 2015
Ebony G. Patterson, Invisible Presence: Bling Memories (2014), installation view from EN MAS’, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, 2015. Photo: Sarrah Danziger.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro of Artforum recently reviewed the premier exhibition of EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean at the CAC New Orleans. Jelly-Schapiro efficiently summarizes the impetus behind the project as a whole and emphasizes the questions posed by the exhibition, stating:
“How might carnival’s attendant forms of aesthetic practice and ritual modes of masquerade—the performative arts that Trinidadians call mas’—be synthesized with the larger contemporary discourse of performance art, with its genealogy presumed to originate in the bodily economies not of chattel slavery but of Europe’s avant-gardes?”
The article goes on to discuss the importance of these questions to our current understanding of contemporary performance, and the CAC as an ideal locus for the presentation and further discussion of these ideas.
To read the full article, visit Artforum’s website, here.