FINDING BLACK, 2014 – 2015 INSTALL VIEWS

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Culture, according to Stuart Hall is a site of ‘negotiation’. In Finding Black I explore the notion that a person of colour shouldn’t be defined by passing “pop-litical” references, which are often stereotypical, racist and reductive. W.E.B. Dubois coined the term “double consciousness” to describe the African American struggle to balance being African and American. As a black man from the Caribbean, I juggle a triple consciousness – one based on being Trinidadian with its post colonial baggage, another bounded by class entitlements, and another based on a populist political and cultural media conditioning. It is at the intersection of this triple consciousness, that Finding Black situates itself as an interrogation of my black identity programming, based on my consumption of popular culture and media, inclusive of American and British film, television, comics, literature, soca, dancehall, hip-hop music, and current world affairs. It is a phenomenological and on-going work.