Happy Islands| Curator: José Manuel Noceda Fernández| Free Zone Aruba| Museo Arquelogico | ANA Archi

With 22 guests from 13 countries, Happy Islands wishes to highlight the modulations and updating processes occurred in the insular art practices in the most recent decades.

I have always been powerfully attracted to the slogan that appears in the license plates of automobiles in Aruba: Aruba. One happy Island, and it makes me think of the history and fate of this “discontinuous group” of territories —some of them continental.

Aruba is one of the Leeward Isles that practically closes the arch of the Lesser Antilles toward the south, very close to the coasts of Venezuela. Initially a Spanish possession —some original names have been preserved in Spanish— becoming part of the Dutch Antilles. Although it was one of the so-called useless islands because of the rather wild nature of its topography and the scarcity of natural resources to attract the interest of the European metropolis, today it flourishes as one of the eartly paradises in the area, to a great extent due to the natural conditions and to its beaches and the take-off of tourism economy. And it is a good laboratory where many of the contradictions that still underlie in the Caribbean may be observed.

The spirit of Happy Islands insists on a plural and expansive projection. The artists from the Caribbean utilize the fissures of the global and postmodern discourses to grant more visibility to their symbolical productions, but they likewise express the deep need to rethink those global circumstances adopting positions toward the south, tracing new territories that refer «to the specific cultural histories forged by postcolonial societies…». Hence the fact that they make up a very diverse block, unified perhaps by their interest in acknowledging and validating the hybrid identities, in discoursing about the Caribbean’s historical alibis, in assuming critical positions from the standpoint of art in the face of its contexts.

Text fragment wrote by José Manuel Noceda Fernández.

Happy Islands Photos

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The Artists List

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