We are pleased to present Sour Grass' final multi-year collaboration Team Melly. Over the past three years, Sour Grass has curated an annual exhibition with Kunstinstituut Melly kicking off with a solo exhibition of Trinidad and Tobago-based Jamaican artist Jasmine Thomas-Girvan in October 2021, Puerto Rican film artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz in 2022, and we wrap up in the summer of 2023 with Guadeloupean artist, Kelly Sinnapah Mary.
This multi-year collaboration presents two programmes (i) “Gatherings” which proposes aspirational qualities of being, assembly, and exchange, and (ii) “Passages” which will offer deeper reflections and exchanges within public fora and invitational sessions. The drop down link above labeled Melly gives an understanding of the exhibition details, programming and pedagogic inputs.⠀
Kelly Sinnapah Mary “The Fables of Sanbras”
June 9th, 2023 - November 19th, 2023Biography
Kelly Sinnapah Mary lives and works in Guadeloupe. Through different mediums, the artist creates images referring to biblical tales and stories that rocked her childhood, mixing cruelty and enchantment, while exploring postcolonial dilemmas and resistance to self-invention. A graduate of the Faculty of Toulouse (France) in visual arts, her work has been shown in Guadeloupe, France and internationally, including Miami (PEREZ Art Museum), Washington DC (IDB Gallery), Hong Kong (Osage Foundation), his works were also visible in 2021 at the 34th Sao Paulo Biennial (Brazil) and at the Ford Foundation (New York) in 2022.
The Fables of Sanbras
KELLY SINNAPAH MARY lives and works in Guadeloupe, an overseas territory of France. Originating in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, her ancestors were relocated with force, deceit, and/or some degree of choice to the Caribbean archipelago as indentured workers following the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century.
This particular chapter of Sinnapah Mary’s family history informs much of her artmaking. Grounded in the work of Caribbean intellectuals—among them, Aimé Césaire, Khal Torabully, and Maryse Condé—storytelling and archetype guide her artistic inquiry into her island, exploring its abundant ecologies, as much as its contested histories, revolutions, and the experiences of and impacts on diasporas.
Showcasing existing and newly commissioned artworks, this exhibition is Sinnapah Mary’s first in The Netherlands. Her paintings, tapestries, sculpture, and artistic interventions draw on a repository of memories, mythologies, and superstitions, which together wrestle with certain ideological constructs that have been imposed by the West. The artist interweaves references to rituals, as well as encounters between native and invasive creatures from land and sea.
Portrait of Kelly’s Grandmother Violette in her garden. Image courtesy the artist.
“Sinnapah Mary’s work consciously raises the intelligence and life of sentience..”
For Sinnapah Mary, these kinds of entanglements picture the dawning of a new era, where a human and more-than-human world find alliance and kinship, contesting colonialist projects that have sought to determine and control the role of the natural world.
Kelly Sinnapah Mary: The Fables of Sanbras is curated by Sour Grass as part of Gatherings and Passages, a multi-year initiative at Kunstinstituut Melly focused on contemporary Caribbean art and culture. Sour Grass is the Barbados-based curatorial experiment and duo of Annalee Davis and Holly Bynoe. Begun in 2021, Gatherings and Passages programming has touched upon histories of enslavement and Diaspora, post-colonial experience, and ecological crisis.
Featuring two newly commissioned paintings and one sculpture, Sinnapah Mary considers daily rituals of waking in the morning, feeding hens, and watering plants as precise actions interlacing her rapport with the flora and fauna with her surrounding home and studio. Her interest in interweaving human and non-human kin acts, in part, as an acknowledgement of her grandmother Violette, who shared a closeness with her garden and with the orphaned animals she adopted and nurtured. Similar to those Caribbean women who, like Violette, lived close to the earth fostering intimate understandings of botanicals, Sinnapah Mary’s paintings wed the body with its lush, green surroundings and non-human kin until they can no longer be separated from one another.
Photos by Aad Hoogendoorn and courtesy of Kunstinstituut Melly.
