Rodell Warner’s photo and digital media exhibition “Augmented Archives” is on view from March 4 to 14, 2021 at TERN Gallery, the new contemporary art gallery in Nassau, Bahamas, dedicated to spotlighting Caribbean artists. 

Augmented Archives consists of 20 video prints by Trinidadian digital artist Rodell Warner that simultaneously challenge and repair the digital Caribbean archive. This collection of video prints renders found photographs set in the 20th century in the Caribbean as active representations of history through digital animation—with a majority of the works appearing in color for the first time at TERN. 

Motivated by his own investigation of the complicated history of documentation in the Caribbean, Warner sources these photos from private familial repositories as well as digital archives spanning the globe. The result is a provocative collection of moving images from the Caribbean diaspora, offering space for reflection and reimagination of the relationship between diasporic past and present.

Augmented Archives will be TERN Gallery’s first solo exhibition, setting the pace for a new generation of thinkers and creators that the gallery aims to platform to global audiences. Warner’s inventive and unique video prints emerge as a contemporary exemplar of Caribbean art that is not framed by eurocentric perspectives, but by Caribbean futures. 

[Photo above: Rodell Warner, Family and Friends no.1, 2017. Single-channel video, color, 32s loop.]