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Burnt Sugar Blue, curated by author francesca ekwuyasi and on now at The Dalhousie Gallery, explores the link between the sugar trade and the history of the Black Atlantic
Burnt Sugar Blue, curated by author francesca ekwuyasi and on now at The Dalhousie Gallery, explores the link between the sugar trade and the history of the Black AtlanticThe audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.
Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results. A still from the art film "Deep Inside I'm Blue Still" by Adama Delphine Fawundu, part of Burnt Sugar Blue at the Dalhousie Art Gallery.
francesca ekwuyasi doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but sugar has nonetheless been on the writer and multidisciplinary artist’s mind since 2017 — a craving for more that’s been growing since she first encountered the 75-foot-tall sugar-coated sculpture “I was thinking about the history of sugar and wanting to just make the connections, right? The constellation of circumstances that leads to how we understand something in the present,” ekwuyasi says.
“I was thinking about how I might create work that tells this story. ”Burnt Sugar Blue, ekwuyasi’s curatorial debut, is the result of that fascination. On view at Halifax’s Dalhousie University Art Gallery until Nov. 8, the exhibition is billed as exploring histories of “the Black Atlantic. ” The impacts of the transatlantic slave trade and the sugar industry, as well as some lived experiences of Blackness in the region, all contribute to the show’s themes and POV.
The piece features works by four Black women artists: Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, and Christina Leslie, working across multiple mediums. Atlantic Canadian staples like molasses are the result of trade with colonies that had sugar plantations . The connection between generations’ of Black women’s labour and the exploitation of the sugar industry is part of what Walker’s sculpture was highlighting.
) Black Gaze by Stina Baudin, part of the exhibition Burnt Sugar Blue at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. But when it came time for ekwuyasi to tell the story she’d been chewing on for years, it wasn’t enough to craft a variety of perspectives. Instead, she needed other artists to chime in, especially since so many other Black artists had already made works on the subject that she found inspiring.
“I had, at the time, no clear idea what exactly curating was. It seemed like storytelling, right?
Like looking at a mass of material or art, and telling a story through that,” she explains, saying that’s greatest strength is the number of voices in it: “What you can achieve in a collection with multiple people, I find, is more profound than what one artist can do … so that's why the story of sugar — and now indigo — I feel is best told in this way, for me, for now. ” It’s a sentiment those in the show understand intrinsically: “In general, we are not a monolith as Black people. So this idea of there's only being one perspective, I think, is a really colonial approach of looking at history,” says Baudin, a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist and someone ekwuyasi knew from the jump she wanted to include in the show.
“I think by having multiple perspectives and showing this array … of ways of thinking through our Blackness, it really adds to shaping the experiencing of history. ” A photo from Christina Leslie's "Sugar Coat" series, part of the show Burnt Sugar Blue at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. series, on view in the show.
In the images, Baudin explores what she calls “gaps” in data from Statistics Canada, “to reclaim or to question the truth” presented in biased information. )“It felt genuinely magical because I didn't say ‘Your work should be any colour’, but the colors that showed up were blue and brown. Every single one of them had blue,” she says.
“It felt really organic, like their works were genuinely in conversation with each other in a way that I couldn't have foreseen. ” The happy accident of the strong colour scheme also feels like a metaphor for the show’s thesis: That multiple perspectives and voices create a stronger sense of story and understanding of the past than the usual clinical voice of history.
(Baudin says that her contributions to the show are black and white re-imaginings of data, “yet the blue is still there” since the colour has innumerable ties to Black culture, including political and spiritual meanings. In fact, while speaking about“We're all Black, but we all come from different places too,” Baudin adds.
“I'm Haitian-Canadian, and so some of us are coming from the Caribbean, some of us are coming from the continent, and I think, ultimately, it's like a collective of Black female voices that are talking about this subject of Blackness, of history, of archiving, from very different perspectives. ” But despite all the time sugar has been on ekwuyasi’s mind — and the ways works by Baudin and others have given her even more to consider — it doesn’t seem like her fixation is waning: “Now we have refined white sugar in everything.
It's like a task to avoid it,” she says.
“I guess, to be honest, it's something I'm still thinking about. ”Originally from rural New Brunswick but based in Halifax for almost a decade, Morgan Mullin is a freelance journalist with bylines in Chatelaine and The Globe and Mail. A Polaris Prize Juror, she covers music, arts and culture on the east coast—primarily at local news site The Coast, where she is Arts Editor. She can be found on Twitter at @WellFedWanderer.
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