two women on a road with barbed wire fence and vegetation in the background. The woman on the left stands and holds a long pole in her hand while the other squats by a bucket and holds fruits in her hands

Kept Alive Within Us

Dates September 21.2023

Kept Alive Within Us is a group exhibition that explores various rituals related to the everyday and the natural environment through art by those who hold cultural ties to the Caribbean. Collectively the works underscore the ways in which West African cultural knowledge and customs are embedded within the practice of daily life within this southern geography and throughout the diaspora. Highlighting how ancestral ontological ways of knowing emerge throughout daily domestic actions and encounters with the natural world, Kept Alive Within Us attests to forms of cultural resilience and survival that disrupt and resituate how the Caribbean is encountered and perceived within the West. At a moment when the Caribbean is under threat as a result of climate change and global warming, the installation illustrates how encounters in domestic, gastronomical, ecological, and spatial realms constitute ongoing acts of remembrance and resistance.

Image detail: Las Nietas de Nonó (mulowayi iyaye nonó mapenzi chibale nonó), FOODTOPIA: después de todo territorio (FOODTOPIA: After Every Territory), 2020-2021, video (colour, sound) 27:54 minutes. Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). Courtesy of the artists