Leah Gordon is a multi-media artist who curates, collects, writes and directs. She works across a variety of media including photography, film and installations, often including commissioned sculpture and painting. In the 1980's she wrote lyrics, sang and played for the feminist folk punk band, 'The Doonicans'. Leah makes work on Modernism and architecture; the slave trade and industrialisation; and grassroots religious, class and folk histories. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale; the National Portrait Gallery, UK; Parc de la Villette, Paris and NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale. Her photography book 'Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti' was published in June 2010. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; on the curatorial team for ‘In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art’ at the Fowler Museum, UCLA and was the guest curator for the 2016 NYC Outsider Art Fair. In 2015 Leah Gordon was the recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean. website
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Sixteen year long project of photographs and oral histories documenting Kanaval in Jacmel, Haiti.
Henry Ford once said, "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition." What we find on the streets of Jacmel at carnival time unravels this statement with acerbity, threat, imagination, grace and a wild surrealism. The whole event is swirling around in a miasma of warped historical retelling. This is the kind of history that would be making Henry Ford's palms a tad sweaty. And so it should. This is people taking history into their own hands and moulding it into whatever they decide. So within this Historical retelling we find mask after mask, but rather than concealing, they are revealing, story after story, through disguise and roadside pantomime. website
All images © Leah Gordon
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