“…Dreaming at the edge of the world.” Michael Mondezie (Trinidad Express) speaks to Kvita Mongroo about her present exhibition at the Soft Box Gallery (on Alcazar Street) in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and the themes and explorations that one may find at the core of her artistic production. Here are excerpts from the Trinidad Express article. [Also see our previous post Exhibition: The Visionary’s Last Gift.]
Artist Kvita Mongroo’s new exhibition, The Visionary’s Last Gift, poses a question on Indian Arrival Day weekend that goes beyond heritage and remembrance.
The mixed media artist is using the dream as a space to think through arrival, survival, inherited grief and the possibility of imagining new worlds.
For Mongroo, the timing of the exhibit, currently on display at Soft Box Gallery in Port of Spain until June 6, brings another layer to work already concerned with crossing, memory, destruction, creation and what Caribbean people may need to take forward.
“When I stop to think about it, it is really wonderful that we celebrate Indian Arrival Day, that we celebrate with much fanfare the arrival of a people into a land they were not native to, but a land they did not arrive in to pillage or raze, but to develop and thrive in, through much hardship,” Mongroo told the Express Wednesday.
She added, “This is something that today, we see the opposite happening—we see grotesque examples of ‘arrivals’ accompanied by massive death, destruction and erasure.” [. . .]
Mongroo’s work draws from her grounding in philosophy and her lived experience in T&T, where she sees Caribbean imagination as deeply shaped by history. For her, West Indian societies were first assembled to serve European economies, leaving Caribbean people with a relatively short history of world-building on their own terms.
That concern has led her to one of the questions at the centre of her work: on what basis can a future be constructed? [. . .]
“We persist down this path or with this thirst for self-destruction,” she said. “So, what I have done in my work is create God-like characters who thrive on imagination and dare to dream of alternate realties of their own creation.” [. . .]
Mongroo has described her larger artistic interest as “Caribbean futurism.”
“It is more of an artistic model that imagines a future that elevates our ancestral heritage and successfully combines it with a kind of artistic practice that preserves our culture while ensuring our literal survival.”
That thinking comes through in works such as “Three Wisdoms Came from the East”, where Mongroo depicts three moko jumbies in a flower field, referencing the three wise men who visited the baby Jesus.
“Surely these wisdoms would have hailed from regions in Africa, Asia or Persia,” she said. “My moko jumbies are exalted, regal knowledge-gods. And why shouldn’t they be?” [. . .]
For full article, see https://trinidadexpress.com/features/local/kvita-s-last-gift/article_e4e878f6-73ee-4010-9f1d-45d74acc1a9d.html#google_vignette
[Shown above: 1) Kvita Mongroo works on her painting Antigone. 2” “What’s real is real.”]
“…Dreaming at the edge of the world.” Michael Mondezie (Trinidad Express) speaks to Kvita Mongroo about her present exhibition at the Soft Box Gallery (on Alcazar Street) in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and the themes and explorations that one may find at the core of her artistic production. Here are excerpts from the Trinidad Express article.
