Kessie Theliar-Charles
Photo credit: Gaëlle Elma
About Kessie
Kessie Theliar-Charles is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher affiliated with CIDIHCA (Centre international de documentation et d'information haïtienne, caribéenne et afro-canadienne) and co-founder of the research collective Black Art Histories Montreal. With a particular interest in the Haitian diaspora, she focuses on the recovery, preservation and dissemination of the legacy of Afro-descendant visual artists who have been and continue to be active in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.
“Ensuring that Afro-Montrealers are visible to each other, in terms of their histories and cultural productions in the city, is at the heart of my creative process. My practice has led me to explore marginalized narratives that are largely undocumented, and to seek different ways of preserving and disseminating them. This residency, inspired by this absence of writing, underlines for me the importance of the archival dimension of writing.”
More About the Project - A Taste for Critique: A Poetics of Attention
I am not an art critic, but I can discern its forms, functions, and possibilities. I sense a writing style that can reveal itself as poetic, fluid, contradictory, sometimes simple or complex, with words unfolding in a variety of tones and rhythms. The writing can be inquisitive and considerate, but also dreaded if perceived solely as an act of judgment and assessment. We don’t grant it nearly enough of its underlying relationality.
In Montréal, where the past of artists from Haitian, Caribbean, and Black communities remains fragmented and under-documented, thinking and writing about art always takes me in their direction. My interest in the recovery, conservation, and dissemination of narratives from the margins has led me to consider art criticism in other ways. For whom do we write and to what end? My writing is conditioned by this question and leads me to examine the rarity of critical Black voices who write about art, as well as the limited production of critical texts dedicated to the art practices of Black artists.
Esse articles referenced:
Eddie Firmin - Cultural Imperative, Appropriationist Regime and Visual Art
