Diary: three days to the opening

Detail of Ravi Rajcoomar's SPAN installation


With three days remaining until the opening of the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition, all the members of the SPAN curatorial and organising team are now in Paramaribo, and installation of the artists' works is almost complete at the main exhibition venue, the DSB garden.




Roddney Tjon Poen Gie working on his installation at the DSB garden. His project is a collaboration with photographer Sirano Zalman


The former director's villa and extensive grounds behind De Surinaamsche Bank's headquarters provide numerous indoor and outdoor spaces for works by twenty-nine Surinamese and Dutch artists, some of them created specifically for these sites. On opening night, Friday 26 February, the DSB garden will be illuminated by thousands of lights as guests encounter works including painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and several performance projects.




Sri Irodikromo installing her work in the DSB garden



Sunil Puljhun helps install Irodikromo's work

Concept: "suicide" installation, by Ravi Rajcoomar

Ravi Rajcoomar's SPAN project proposal is an installation commenting on a painful social issue. He explains:

Suicide is a worldwide problem that seems to have no end. Some people take their own lives with hate, then you have terrorists who do it to kill others, and some do it to solve their problems. In recent years there have been many suicides and suicide attempts in Suriname — this is maybe one of the countries with the most suicides. It happens all over the country, but especially in Nickerie.

Everybody keeps talking about this. It got me thinking about what I could do as an artist to get people to reconsider their thoughts of suicide. My idea is to create an installation to encourage discussion.

It will be large box made out of triplex safety glass, with human silhouettes cut out, so you can easily walk through. More silhouetted figures will hang from the roof above. The interior walls will be covered with text, accompanied by a sound installation. The exterior will be bare white.

Conjunction: street posters/Ravi Rajcoomar

By Nicholas Laughlin




Battle of Hispagnola posters along Kleine Waterstraat, Paramaribo, 28 June, 2009; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


An urban landscape is defined not only by buildings and squares and streets, but also by the people who inhabit and pass through them, their vehicles and equipment and merchandise, and the ephemeral traces they leave behind in the form of signs, graffiti, and posters.

Walking around Paramaribo, I noticed there were specific locations — the walls of abandoned buildings, temporary fences and hoardings — where event promoters advertise their parties, concerts, or sports tournaments, sticking up posters in overlapping dozens or even scores to achieve maximum visibility. In late June 2009, three events dominated this urban wallpaper: a "Battle of Hispagnola" boxing tournament, pitting Surinamese fighters against a team from the Dominican Republic; a concert by the visiting Congolese performer Djouna "Big One" Mumbafu; and the Lustig Festival, a big party organised by private promoters at a river beach inland from Paramaribo.




Djouna Big One and Lustig Festival posters along the Waterkant, Paramaribo, 24 June, 2009; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


Of the three, the Lustig Festival posters were the most arrestingly surreal. They emphasised the white sand of the beach location, and the event's tagline — "A Caribbean Fusion of Fantasies" — achieved visual form in a montage of stock photos. A flamingo, an alligator, three pots of gold, a monkey, colourful tree frogs, a bottle of Champagne, a toucan, and a young woman with Latin features — wearing a tiny bikini — burst forth from a pirate's treasure chest. You could write a whole dissertation on what this assemblage of images in this context says about Suriname's relationship to the Caribbean, or to ideas of "Caribbeanness".




Behind the Mask (mixed media, 120 x 145 cm, 2008) by Ravi Rajcoomar; image courtesy the artist


Ravi Rajcoomar's recent paintings, with their bold colours, graphic deployment of text, stencilled silhouettes, and palimpsestic collages, make explicit reference to street posters, graffiti, and the accidental, evolving "murals" created by layers of paint, paper, and glue on Paramaribo's urban surfaces. Their mirror-reversed text fragments and ambiguously gesturing human figures suggest stymied communication: a dream diary, a narrative without a key, a map missing its legend. He writes that these works explore "the mystery, the unknown, the untold, the unspoken, and the unsaid" of human interaction.

More immediately and subtly than a traditional topographical view — a rendering of a picturesque building or bustling market scene — Rajcoomar's paintings record the city of Paramaribo, close up and at street level. Words depicted as graphic forms overlap like voices from a crowd. Chaos plays against order, energy against melancholy, as in urban landscapes anywhere in the world, but letterforms hinting at Afaka script ground these works in Suriname, in Paramaribo.




Rajcoomar at work in his studio during his recent residency in Rotterdam; image courtesy the artist


See more of Rajcoomar's recent works at his website.

Meanwhile: September and October 2009

Notes on other current and upcoming art events in Suriname and elsewhere



Entangled Red and Blue (acrylic on canvas, 102 x 82 cm, 1993), by Erwin de Vries. Image courtesy Kunsthal Rotterdam

= Tribute to the Woman: Erwin de Vries
Kunsthal Rotterdam; 12 September to 29 November, 2009

An exhibition celebrating the eightieth birthday of one of Suriname's elder artists. Over 150 paintings, drawings, and sculptures dating from the 1950s to the present offer an overview of de Vries's oeuvre. In December 2009 the show will move to Fort Zeelandia, Paramaribo.




Poster for the Rotterdam exhibition of new work by Ravi Rajcoomar and Roddney Tjon Poen Gie

= Suriname: Ravi Rajcoomar and Roddney Tjon Poen Gie
Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam; 19 September to 11 October, 2009

New works produced by two Surinamese artists during their recent ArtRoPa residencies in Rotterdam.

Elsewhere: August 2009 issue of De Surinoemer

=


The latest issue of De Surinoemer, dated August 2009, has been released online. It features interviews (in Dutch) with two Surinamese artists currently participating in ArtRoPa residencies in Rotterdam: Roddney Tjon Poen Gie and Ravi Rajcoomar. Edited by Dutch artist Arnold Schalks and Surinamese artist Kurt Nahar, De Surinoemer is a free journal published at irregular intervals, documenting the ArtRoPa project. It is distributed in Paramaribo in a limited-edition printed version, and online in various formats (text, PDF, JPEG) at www.desurinoemer.net.

Translated excerpts from the artists' interviews in this edition of De Surinoemer will appear on Paramaribo SPAN in coming weeks.