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PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI
VARIOUS VENUES
Cofounded in 2009 by artist-curators Leah Gordon (UK) and André Eugene (Haiti) and sited in the Grand Rue neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the Ghetto Biennale brings together a cadre of international artists with Atis Rezistans, a group of Haitian artists who live on Grand Rue and incorporate the detritus of that dense urban center into their work in a creative process they call récupération. Positing a curatorial ethic distinct from socially engaged practices emblematized by artists like Theaster Gates and Thomas Hirschhorn, the exhibition embodies a number of conflicting aims, as its ostensibly contradictory moniker suggests. The Atis Rezistans practitioners seek to enter an art market from which they have been largely excluded. Their foreign colleagues, in contrast, articulate their projects and enfold their own presence in the neighborhood as a conceptual encounter with Haitian history and culture as well as a critique of the occidental art complex with its white cubes and global art fairs.
Inviting artists to engage with the...