Kanaval

Photo exhibition

Each year, Jacmel, a coastal town in Southern Haiti, holds pre-Lenten Mardi Gras Festivities. Troupes of ‘performers’ act out mythological and political tales in a whorish theatre of the absurd that courses the streets unshackled by traditional parade.

The characters and costume partially betray their roots in medieval European carnival, but the Jacmellien masquerades are also a fusion of clandestine Vodou, ancestral memory, political satire and personal revelation.

LEAH GORDON is an artist and curator and has produced a body of work on the representational boundaries between art, religion, anthropology, post-colonialism and folk history. Her photographic work registers junctures between history, cosmology and the present. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the National Portrait Gallery, UK, Parc de la Villette, Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Her photography book ‘Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti’ was published in June 2010. Leah is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Gordon was the adjunct curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, was on the curatorial team for the ‘In Extremis’ show in 2012 at the Fowler Museum, UCLA as well as the co-curator of Kafou: Haiti, History & Art, at the Nottingham Contemporary. Gordon is a senior lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire and is represented by Riflemaker Gallery, London.