In the wake of a haunting

“In the Wake of A Haunting” is a two-person exhibition by La Vaughn Belle (US Virgin Islands) and Tamika Galanis (The Bahamas). La Vaughn Belle is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice “makes visible the unremembered through exploring the material culture of coloniality [by] creating narratives from fragments and silences.” Tamika Galanis is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist whose “work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns.”

“In the Wake of A Haunting” observes the manifestations in both Belle and Galanis’ practices of the lures from the archive, both the landscape and the metaphysical. Hauntings often dredge up fears of the otherworldly, ‘duppies’ and ‘sperrits’; however ideas, concepts, stories, and intriguing information repeatedly come to visit us after being first imparted. The remembering persists and, for some, it becomes motivation to follow the pathways they present.

The haunting is a call to decolonization and the dismantling of systems that keep us fragmented. Belle conjures this fragmentation of body from land, land from atmosphere, archives from people, and people from history and brews new modes of being. She is interested in “elements of the natural world, like the land or sea, powerful forces like the hurricane, for strategies in how to disrupt the colonial gaze and its hierarchies.” While her multilayered, mixed media, and beautifully chaotic works illustrate the landscape in movement affected by turbulent winds. Belle presents the “aesthetics of ruin as a way to reimagine our ‘pastpresents’ and gesture towards new and possible futures.”

For Galanis, the archive has become a haunting turned kin. The visitations came through the unnamed repeated faces appearing in photo archives only attached to a familiar place. She saw a loose thread in slave records, pulled it to Cat Island, an eastern Bahamian island, and was led to the ladder stitch between our archipelago and the American South. Galanis weaves the landscapes of the saltwater railroad together again by investigating the remnants of Gullah Geechee culture in our terrains. Narrowing on the bonds between the Carolinas and The Bahamas, through photography, video and installation, Galanis focuses on the Gullah bottle trees present within our respective spaces that are used to capture ‘sperrits’ that try to invade homes at night. The presence of these bottle trees, which have evolved to decoration, are monuments to the shared ancestral spiritual practices between The Carolinas and The Bahamas.

As researchers, both Belle and Galanis follow the hauntings and listen intently to the calls of the past to unearth and to patch linkages between place and time. They urge their audience to remember and to access collective memory for storytelling, record-keeping and archive-making.

TERN Gallery Mahogany Hill, Western Road Nassau, The Bahamas info@terngallery.com / +1 242 698 6300 ext 450 Website