Liverpool Biennial
18.9. – 28.11.2010
@ Contemporary Urban Centre
41-51 Greenland Street
Liverpool L1 0BS
Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm,
Sunday 11am-4pm
“How are we to write the histories of non-western societies in relation to modernity? Modernity is, as we know, an extremely slippery signifier, and appears here with as many quote marks as I can muster: and ‘the modern’ in its many derivatives – early modern, late modern, post-modern, modernity, modernism – has long been effectively appropriated to the story of the west, monopolizing for western civilization the privilege of living to the full the potentialities of the present ‘from the inside’.
It is therefore difficult to imagine this story in any way other than as a binary polarity: modernity and its ‘others’. Only two narrative alternatives then seem possible. Either the story is told from within the perspective of modernity itself: in which case it is difficult to prevent it becoming a triumphalist narrative in which the ‘others’ are permanently marginalized. 
Or one reorients the story within its margins, seeking by this move to reverse and disrupt the normalised order of things by bringing into visibility all that cannot be seen from, or is structurally obscured by, the usual vantage point.”
Modernity and Its Others: Three ‘Moments’ In The Post-war History of the Black Diaspora Arts by Stuart Hall.
In his groundbreaking essay Stuart Hall re-visits modernity through three historical art movements from the perspective of the Diaspora. It is our intention to use this discourse as the theme of Three Moments, the Caribbean pavilion at the Liverpool Biennial, where these moments are symbolised by the three Caribbean islands states: the Bahamas, Martinique and Barbados.The featured artists – Ewan Atkinson, Ras Ishi Butcher and Ras Akyem-i Ramsey from Barbados, Christian Bertin and David Damoison from Martinique and John Beadle, Blue Curry, Lavar Munroe, Lynn Parotti and Heino Schmid from the Bahamas – were selected on their ability to make work that responds to contemporary and historical global themes. 
For the first time artists from the Caribbean region are collectively making new work that responds to the city of Liverpool while maintaining a distinctive stance on what Stuart Hall might call a 21st-century Caribbean modernist aesthetic. 
Three Moments is selected and curated by Dominique Brebion (Martinique), Alissandra Cummins (Barbados), Holly Parotti (Bahamas) and Allison Thompson (Barbados) in collaboration with the ICF.
photo © Minako Jackson and Lynn Parotti
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