We are so excited to hear about this upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama (MAC Panama) by two of our favorites, artists Nadia Huggins (St. Vincent) and Tessa Mars (Haiti). Stemming from the three-year research project The Current IV Caribbean 2023–2025, “otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua” [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves]— which saw its first iteration at Ocean Space in Venice— will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama (MAC Panama) from February 28 to August 16, 2026. This show is co-curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela. MAC Panama is located on the first floor of the San Juan de Dios Building, Avenue B (corner of 9th) Casco Colonial, Panama. Here is a description from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21). [Bios below are from our previous post Exhibition: otras montañas… and from Ocean Space.]
Description: The exhibition otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves], curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, was born as the culmination of the three-year research project The Current IV Caribbean 2023–2025, which interwove geology, memory, and practices of resistance in the Caribbean, offering a reflection on the Ocean as a transformative space. otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves], first exhibited at Ocean Space in Venice in 2025, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama (MAC Panama) from February 28 to August 16, 2026, under the co-curation of Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela. The project aims to identify and share the aesthetic strategies that emerged from the Maroon experience in the Caribbean, referring to the cultural and expressive practices developed by communities of formerly enslaved Africans who escaped colonial plantations and forged autonomous ways of life.
The project is centered on the study and circulation of aesthetic strategies, of ways of creating meaning through art, symbolism, spatial practices, and sensory expression, that emerged from the Maroon community in the Caribbean. The survival of this community required not only political resistance but also the development of distinctive cultural, artistic, and environmental practices. By identifying these aesthetic strategies, the project seeks to make visible how Maroon communities transformed resistance into enduring forms of expression. These strategies include modes of storytelling, ritual, music, spatial organization, and relationships with the natural environment, all of which encode knowledge about freedom, survival, and collective identity. Emancipation here is understood not only as the historical abolition of slavery, but as an ongoing process of reclaiming autonomy, memory, and cultural agency in the aftermath of colonial domination. By foregrounding Maroon aesthetics, the project supports alternative narratives of Caribbean history; ones that emphasize self-determination, creativity, and resistance rather than victimhood.
For Maroon communities, the Ocean was not merely a geographic boundary but a powerful presence: a route of forced displacement, a space of danger and possibility, and a source of sustenance, orientation, and spiritual meaning. Re-engaging with this oceanic dimension highlights how Maroon aesthetics are deeply tied to maritime knowledge and coastal ecologies, encouraging contemporary Caribbean societies to rethink their relationship with the Ocean as a site of memory, identity, and future possibility.
In The Current IV Caribbean 2023–2025, Yina Jiménez Suriel, mentor and curator of the cycle, collaborated with artists Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars. Both presented their two new commissions in the exhibition in Venice: A Shipwreck is Not a Wreck and A Call to the Ocean, respectively, which transform mountains and shipwrecks into living spaces of knowledge, memory, and alternative futures.
The exhibition has taken shape within the framework of TBA21–Academy, the research platform of the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, through The Current, the pioneering curatorial fellowship that nurtures collaboration and the exchange of ideas around the ocean. Each three-year cycle culminates in a debut exhibition at Ocean Space, the former Church of San Lorenzo, featuring new commissions.
Nadia Huggins was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she is currently based. A self-taught artist, she works in photography and, since 2010, has built a body of images that are characterized by her observation of and interest in the everyday. Her work merges documentary and conceptual practices, which explore ecology, belonging, identity, and memory through a contemporary approach focused on re-presenting Caribbean landscapes and the sea. Huggins’ photographs have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, US, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Ethiopia, Guadeloupe, France, and the Dominican Republic. She has had solo shows in the US at KJCC/NYU, NYC and at The Betsy Hotel, Miami, and in Europe in London and at Now Gallery. Her work forms part of the collection of The Wedge Collection (Toronto, Canada), The National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston), and The Art Museum of the Americas (Washington DC, USA).
Tessa Mars is a Haitian visual artist who explores gender, landscape, migration, and spirituality in relation to Haitian history. Working primarily in painting and papier maché, the artist takes distance from colonial narratives to reconnect to a Haitian perspective of the world and embrace other forms of collective belonging. Mars received a BFA from Rennes 2 University in France in 2006 and is now based in Haiti and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions at Le Centre d’Art and the French Institute in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and has participated in collective exhibitions at Tiwani Gallery, London, UK; Denver Art Museum, CO; Art Africa Miami, FL; Ateliers ’89, Oranjestad, Aruba; Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul, Canada; Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; and Cité international des arts, Paris, France. Tessa Mars was part of the first Haitian pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.
CURATORS: Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela
For more information, see https://tba21.org/othermountains_panama and https://macpanama.org/
Also see https://www.ocean-space.org/exhibitions/nadia-huggins-tessa-mars-otras-montanas-las-que-andan-sueltas-bajo-el-agua-altre-montagne-alla-deriva-sotto-le-onde and our previous post, https://repeatingislands.com/2025/03/28/exhibition-otras-montanas-las-que-andan-sueltas-bajo-el-agua/
[Photo above: Nadia Huggins.]