Broadway World Miami reminds us that the Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Miami Dade College (MDC) is hosting “Where the Oceans Meet,” an exhibition of modern and contemporary art that resonates with the pioneering thought of two Caribbean writers: Lydia Cabrera and Edouard Glissant. The exhibition—curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza, Gabriela Rangel, and Rina Carvajal—opened on May 26 and will remain on view until September 29, 2019, at the Miami Dade College Museum of Art and Design (located at 600 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, Florida). [See previous post.] Here are excerpts; visit Broadway World Miami for the full article.

The international group of thirty-eight artists and collectives in the exhibition consider notions of shifting and porous borders-geographic, national, cultural, social, racial, ethnic, and linguistic-and how crossing borders has shaped our world. [. . .]

We often imagine that globalization and technology bring us closer together and make us more connected, yet borders-both physical and ideological-increasingly divide us. Where the Oceans Meet engages two key figures who devoted their work to thinking through borders: the Cuban painter, scholar, and writer Cabrera (Havana, Cuba, 1899-1991, Miami, Florida) and the Martinican philosopher, poet, and literary critic Glissant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1928-2011, Paris, France). Embodied by the works of art in the exhibition, the ideas of Cabrera and Glissant together explore the grounds from which art can consider and break through barriers of history, geography, and culture.

Although coming from different places and parts of the world, the artists in this exhibition share this foundational space that simultaneously separates and connects them. Echoing the literary, anthropological, and philosophical work of Cabrera and Glissant, their art interrogates how borders shape identities and negotiate imaginary spaces. Their inquiries resonate across mediums and genres, and attempt to answer urgent questions that concern us all today.

In addition to a selection of archival materials related to Cabrera and Glissant, Where the Oceans Meet includes works by Niv Acosta, Etel Adnan, Carlos Alfonso, Kader Attia, Belkis Ayón, Yto Barrada, Daniel Boyd, Tania Brugera, Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste, Agustín Cárdenas, Maya Deren, Manthia Diawara, Melvin Edwards, Juan Francisco Elso, Öyvind Fahlström, Simone Fattal, Andrea Geyer, Sylvie Glissant, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Koo Jeong A, Wifredo Lam, Glenn Ligon, Lani Maestro, Roberto Matta, Julie Mehretu, Ana Mendieta, The Otolith Group, Amelia Pelaez, André Pierre, Walid Raad, Raqs Media Collective, Anri Sala, Antonio Segui, Elena Tejada-Herrera, Pierre Verger, Jack Whitten, and Andros Zins-Browne.

Where the Oceans Meet gathers these artists’ and writers’ visions for transforming the world when politics fail. For Glissant, such visions condense a poetics as “a new region of the world.” Moving between cultures, the artists in this exhibition handle multiple layers of time and space, making palpable the many opacities pertaining to migration, diasporic movements, language, race, gender, memory, history, religious rituals, violence, and hospitality.

In her transdisciplinary intellectual and creative work, Cabrera fluidly connected cultures, languages, and genres while disrupting racial barriers. Her research made possible a new awareness of culture conceived as a process of social relations. As a writer and ethnographer, she approached the languages, religions, myths, and cosmologies of Afro-Cubans without class prejudice or cultural hierarchies. Similarly, her disinterest in academic theorizing and her methods of constructing knowledge led her to imagine a rich space of contamination between fiction and reality, between her own literary work and the testimonies of her informants, which fed her numerous ethnographic studies. This exhibition puts Cabrera’s ideas into productive communication with those of Glissant, likewise committed to preserving and highlighting connections among cultures. For Glissant, the archipelago and the drift of the oceans constitute a pattern for a future region of the world, where oceans (and cultures) meet. His work transgresses the boundaries between theory and poetry to enhance understanding of language, identity, space, history, and knowledge. He examines the pain historically endured by Caribbean communities, and the sustainability and innovation that derives from survival under duress, to contemplate cultural transformations affecting peoples today on a global scale.

The title of the exhibition, Where the Oceans Meet, comes from a sentence that opens Glissant’s 2006 book Une nouvelle région du monde (A New Region of the World). The phrase suggests the geographical connection between Glissant and Cabrera; it also hints at a transnational and global conception of the world. Where the Oceans Meet implies a constantly shifting border where peoples, cultures, languages, memories, and identities encounter and affect each other, in favorable times as well as in times of disaster. This swarm of tides and streams also conjures an image of the mind, where individual and collective subconscious drives and memories meander. More than a metaphor, it names the location where the multiple layers and sedimentations of our global world encounter and dissolve geographic and political frontiers.

We may also understand Where the Oceans Meet as referring to an aesthetics generated within and from meetings among peoples and cultures. Creative processes, their unpredictable shapes and transformations, can result from encounter and from displacement of social, political, and cultural practices. The experience of resilience, and of attempts to restructure a sense of belonging, is also an aesthetic experience.

Miami, a city where oceans meet, provides a most relevant location for this exhibition. On this occasion, Miami, so often imagined as a crossroads of the Americas and a space of transition par excellence, will offer a platform for questioning colonial and modern thought, and placing it into perspective.

Where the Oceans Meet is dedicated to Eduardo J. Padrón, President of Miami Dade College since 1995. His steadfast leadership and unwavering belief in MDC and MOAD have enabled us to undertake programming such as this exhibition and laid the foundation for our renewed sense of mission. He will be deeply missed upon his departure from his position later this year.

The curators of the exhibition also dedicate it to the memory of our dear friend Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), who regularly crossed borders and broke barriers in his life and in his groundbreaking curatorial projects. His example will remain an inspiration. [. . .]

[Image above: Lani Maestro’s “A Book Thick of Ocean.” Accessed via https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-miami-where-the-oceans-meet-at-museum-of-art-and-design-11178420.]

For full article, see https://www.broadwayworld.com/miami/article/Museum-Of-Art-And-Design-At-MDC-Presents-WHERE-THE-OCEANS-MEET-20190429

Also visit mdcmoad.org