Transatlantic movement and the taste for ethnicity: art and ‘exchange’ between Suriname and the Netherlands

Wainwright, Leon (2013). Transatlantic movement and the taste for ethnicity: art and ‘exchange’ between Suriname and the Netherlands. Etnofoor, 24(2) pp. 13–40.

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, art practices of the Caribbean became subject to the scholarly analysis of global, transnational movement and cultural interconnectedness. This approach has had an impact outside the academy in various art world contexts where such concepts are taken up and commoditised through taste-making practices. In the urban settings of Paramaribo (Suriname) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands), official sponsorship shaped two related art exhibitions in 2010 which were the culmination of a Suriname-Dutch partnership of ‘cultural exchange’. This essay examines the complexities around the agency of Indo-Caribbean artists specifically in relation to practices of taste formation in the contemporary art environment, and along an axis of connection between the Caribbean and Europe. Raising the matter of ‘a right to the city’ (Harvey 2008), the discussion turns to the uneven relations between nation spaces in the Atlantic region, and how aesthetic taste, urban development and ethnicised difference come together in the circulation and consumption of art of the Caribbean.

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