GROUP EXHIBITION

Errantry is a poetics. — Édouard Glissant

Errantry defines the Black diaspora and its imaginary. The Martinique-born French writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) proposed errantry as a form of freedom and resistance. For Glissant, errantry evoked a spiritual or purposeful wandering beyond national borders or the limits of exile. As a mode of survival, errantry infers fugitivity as well as improvisation. Underlying the emergence of Black modernity, errantry has engendered the dissonance of jazz, the politics of refusal, and ultimately, revolution.

In Praise of Black Errantry explores the poetics of errantry as an aesthetic possibility. The Afro-diasporic artists in this exhibition take up errantry as a radical strategy that defies boundaries, advocating spontaneity and experimentation beyond cultural fixity or political containment. Spanning different themes, the exhibition considers how artists have refuted conventional codes of representation or pushed against the constraints of formal rules of style, colour, medium, or genre towards technical innovation, artistic evolution, and liberation.

The poetics of errantry offers a counter-discourse about Black cultural production, raising critical questions: how has errantry been employed aesthetically and politically as a form of Black dissent? How do incidental encounters of the itinerant or the arbitrary inform technical and formal innovations as well as other artistic freedoms? How do the terms of disobedience and waywardness figure in the art of the Black diaspora?