Reverb isn’t just a sonic phenomenon at Stephen Friedman Gallery, it’s a visual, cultural one too. This group show – a kind of extension of Tate Britain’s 2021 ‘Life Between Islands’ exhibition – starts from the idea that art from the Caribbean diaspora reverberates through the ages and across continents, just like a dub siren reverberating through a packed club.
And dub is both subject and material for Denzil Forrester, whose huge lilac and purple vision of a west London reggae club greets you as you walk in. It’s a celebration of Jamaican culture as an uprooted, transplanted, transcontinental thing. Because culture moves, gets transported across oceans, just like the detritus found washed up on shores and twisted into writhing multi-coloured shapes by Julien Creuzet.
The sea – as a place of historic violence, as the conduit of colonialism – rears its head too in Alberta Whittle’s work; two intricate, bead-adorned tapestries referencing the myth of Drexcya, an underwater realm populated by the 1.8million Africans who died in the Atlantic slave trade.
There’s more mythology in Kathia St.Hilarie’s gorgeous, rough, gloopy paintings, filled with nods to vodou, spiritualism and history, while Charmaine Watkiss’s images draw on the indigenous histories of the Caribbean as a sort of ancestral knowledge, passed down, shared, shaping each generation.
Some of the art here doesn’t fit all that comfortably, but reverb as a theme works. It ties all of this disparate work together into the idea that a place’s impact - or maybe a people’s impact - can last, can spread and disseminate no matter the challenges it faces. The reverberation you see here is the sound of endurance that just won’t stop echoing.
