When asked about France's relationship with the West Indies, Julien Creuzet, who spent his childhood in Martinique, is categorical: ‘It’s France’s relationship with its scene (with what it calls the arts) and its cultural policy that need to be questioned. We can talk about it in terms of “being made invisible,” cultural domination, and a disinterest in some French overseas territories and their specific identities.’ It is worth assessing these comments in relation to the fact that Creuzet was recently chosen to represent France at the Venice Biennale. Is his nomination indicative of how far we’ve come?
The announcement comes four years after the creation of a Guadeloupe pavilion at the 2019 biennale, supported and sponsored by the Krystel Ann Art gallery, a longtime champion of Caribbean art. The exhibition, titled ‘Personal Structures – Identities’, exhibited the work of Joël Nankin, François Piquet, and Jean-Marc Hunt. It aimed to shine a light on these artists’ work, which is still relatively unknown, both in France and internationally. It focused on the particular features of the archipelago and its artists, confirming their place globally. Their work was shown alongside that of the Dominican artist Soraya Abu Naba’a, the Spanish artist Esteve Casanoves, and the Brazilian artist Mazeredo. The juxtaposition illustrated the reconfiguration of the contemporary art scene, its museums, and the market, propelled by critical discourse and artistic practices calling to move away from a Western gaze and practice.
The choice of Creuzet for such an emblematic and internationally significant event in the contemporary art world as the biennale also serves to highlight the ongoing tensions inherited from the (de)colonial history of French overseas territories. The Guadeloupean pavilion reasserted country’s place, and that of its artists, in the regional and international art world. But it also ran the risk of marginalizing them further. Conversely, the choice of Creuzet is a shift back towards the center, confirming the growing interest in a French Caribbean scene, without completely erasing the issues at stake.
Defining the ‘French Caribbean scene’ is a difficult task, one which requires keeping track of a series of changes. Rather than one monolithic entity, it can perhaps be better described as a series of interconnected worlds, geographically spread out, at once close together and far apart. French Caribbean artists are tackling and reformulating ideas of genealogy and artistic inheritance along geographical fault lines. In the West Indies, the art scene is supported by a network of venues that has developed over time. Creuzet makes reference to established spaces in Martinique like Tropiques–Atrium, SERMAC, and La Véranda but there are also newer ones, such as 14N61W, Fondation Clément, and La Station Culturelle,
The Guadeloupean artist Minia Biabiany is part of this scene, without fully aligning with this artistic heritage. She nods to a generation of male painters on the island like Nankin (founder of the group AKIYO) and Michel Rovelas, who also has ties to a younger generation, including Samuel Gelas. But she explains that in the 2010s, when she was a student at Beaux-Arts de Lyon in France, she was interested in African American women like Ellen Gallagher and Kara Walker. Raphaël Barontini – an artist of Guadeloupean descent who recently inaugurated an installation about the history of the fight against slavery in the Panthéon in Paris – speaks about the shock of seeing the work of Jacob Lawrence and Kerry James Marshall during an exchange in New York in 2008.
But above all, it’s the history of colonization, as well as of the territorial reconfigurations and forced and voluntary migrations it entailed, that bring the idea of a French Caribbean scene to its limits. Gaëlle Choisne, a French artist of Haitian origin on her mother’s side, summarizes: ‘We are often left out of the conversation in the West Indies.’ From France, where she grew up and where she lives now, Choisne is constantly thinking about the relationship between Haiti and other countries: the Caribbean, France, and Poland. She said, ‘I learned about Haiti’s history when I went there. I didn’t know the story of its independence, its historical ties with France. It is also the connection between my mother and father – it’s a personal story. It’s about creating where there is something missing, where there’s a gap.’
‘Fragments,’ ‘composites,’ ‘components,’ and even ‘hybridization logic,’ ‘collage,’ and ‘assemblage’: the artists use the same vocabulary of créolité, or Creoleness. ‘There are certain gestures that are ours and that you can find in people’s practices, like assemblage, fragments – trying to stick things back together,’ explained Choisne. ‘It’s very typical of Caribbean artists. For instance, [Kenny] Dunkan, [Julien] Creuzet, [Louisa] Marajo, [Hervé] Télémaque. It’s all fragments. Using fragments, we try to make it say something, to associate it with something, to repair it, reassemble it.’ She warned against smoothing out the art’s rough edges: ‘Our work is often over-simplified, saying that we come from the same places, even though it’s not the same. We are not saying the same thing, and we are not saying it in the same way.’
With this in mind, the work of the Ivorian and Guadeloupean DJ and artist Christelle Oyiri stands out. She often cites Afrofuturism as the starting point for her work but recognizes a difference between it and that of other French Caribbean artists. ‘I don’t work like Gaëlle [Choisne] or Julien [Creuzet]. I find their work a lot more Creole than mine; they go back to lots of different roots. There’s something very composite that I don’t have,’ she said. But this didn’t stop her from working with Creuzet on the video Kiss & Tell in 2020. It was a tribute to her family and was made up of a collection of video recordings taken by Oyiri during a trip to Guadeloupe. In it, she mixes samples, sounds, words, and a voiceover by Creuzet.
She describes the creative process of the piece, which she agrees is a bit of an anomaly when compared to the rest of her work: ‘You have to let yourself be carried along by the silences, the things that are missing, the gaps in the stories – which is not how I operate with the rest of my art. I was able to understand and fill in the gaps and what was missing from my personal story…but I also had to fill these gaps with music, or round them off, or write something. Kiss & Tell was a way of healing that, filling in the gaps.’
It was also by forging links with the region that Biabiany found a connection. Living for a while between Guadeloupe and Mexico, she made artistic and political bridges with South America. ‘In France my work was seen in a very particular way because there was the issue of guilt,’ she explained. ‘[In Mexico], I arrived with books by Glissant, who isn’t well-known there, and I started asking questions about domination, and made parallels between assimilation in Guadeloupe and the construction of Mexican identity.’
But beyond France and the rest of Europe, there is a whole generation of artists that is reforging ties with the Caribbean and the Americas and beyond – in a larger sense. The use of the term ‘Caribbean’ and not ‘antillais’ (French for West Indian) for some illustrates new geographies and relationships that the art coming out of this scene is helping to define. ‘I call myself French Caribbean now,’ Biabiany explained. ‘[The term] allows us to situate the Caribbean and its belonging to France – until now.’
The region, defined as such, allows artists to place themselves and operate within a large area, which goes from the Lesser Antilles to the Greater Antilles, and cultivates dialogue between French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and English-speaking places. For Creuzet, the Caribbean is a ‘cultural hub […] that has as many echoes on the African continent as on the South American continent, or in Europe. [Artists] have the ability to very quickly become international artists as much thanks to the cultural melting pot of the Caribbean as to its colonial history.’
This new recognition of art being made beyond metropolitan France is not only happening in museums but also within the art market. What kind of future could these pieces have in private collections? Barontini acknowledges the important and dedicated work of galleries that specialize in Afro-descendant art. As well as the attention paid to artists, he praises the work done to build up a network of clients: ‘I’ve got collectors at Marianne [Ibrahim]’s who are from Guyana but based in Washington DC. And I might simultaneously sell to a Hollywood producer from New Orleans, which is a region with a Creole history. My work is appreciated by people who understand what it’s about.’
Far from limiting galleries or restricting art collections to specialists or those directly involved, this indicates how this art’s specific nature means it requires particular support, education, and a sense of responsibility. It reveals intra-diaspora dynamics and how they affect the way in which artworks circulate, using codes that come from a similar, if not shared, history.
Oyiri considers the extension of ‘antillanité’ – the state of being from the West Indies – in terms of identity and territory, and also looks to the United States for inspiration: ‘Miami is for me the place where all Black culture meets. There’s the history of slavery from Africa. The Caribbean is just next door. I feel closer to African Americans from the South. If I had to choose a place where I could start a frank conversation about my West Indian-ness, it would be Miami, because of the link I have with all of these people.’
Caroline Honorien is an independent art critic and editor based in Paris.
Translation: Catherine Bennett.
Published on November 24, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Minia Biabiany, Flè a poyo, restauring the body, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. 2. Exhibition view of Gaëlle Choisne, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Lorna Simpson Mentorship 2023 at Acacias Art Center, Paris, 2023. © Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Air de Paris. 3. Christelle Oyiri-K, CFA Bill (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist. 4. Minia Biabiany, The lenght of my gaze at night, 2014. © Maksym Bilousov. Courtesy of the artist.