Talk | Diasporic Rhythms

About the Event

Join us for an online-only conversation between Denzil Forrester—an artist whose vibrant depictions of dancehall culture in the UK appear in the current exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today—with music scholar and cultural activist Sonjah Stanley Niaah, whose many publications foreground the past and present of dancehall.

Please return to this webpage on the day of the talk to join the webinar via Zoom (Passcode: 190116).

About the Speakers

Denzil Forrester‘s (British-Grenadian, b. 1956) vibrant paintings immortalize the dynamic energy of the London reggae and dub nightclub scene during the early 1980s, a subject that has endured throughout four decades of his practice. In his recent work, scenes of urban dancehalls are juxtaposed with themes of social injustice, vivid recollections from his childhood, and contemporary views of Cornwall.

Forrester had solo exhibitions at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida this year. He has exhibited internationally at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate Britain, London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. His work can be found in the collections of Tate, London; Arts Council Collection, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; and Long Museum, Shanghai, among many others. Forrester is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

 
Sonjah Stanley Niaah is a Jamaican cultural studies and music scholar, cultural activist, and international speaker. A former director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies & Reggae Studies Unit at UWI Mona (2015-21), she holds international appointments as a member of the International Scientific Committee of the Slave Route Project (UNESCO) and the Senior Research Associate (honorary) at Rhodes University. She is also an advisor to the executive at the International Cultural Diversity Organisation, an inaugural board member of the Glasgow Caribbean Centre for Development Research (UWI Cave Hill), and has held posts such as vice chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies through which she coordinated the first conference held in the Global South at the UWI (2008). Stanley Niaah is the author/editor of numerous publications. These include Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (University of Ottawa Press, 2010); Dancehall: A Reader on Jamaican Music and Culture (UWI Press, 2020); Dancehall In/Securities: Perspectives on Caribbean Expressive Life (Routledge, 2022); A Study on the Creative Industry as a Pillar of Sustained Growth and Diversification – The Film And Music Sectors In Jamaica, UNECLAC Studies and Perspectives Series – No. 72 (2018); “I’m Broader than Broadway: Caribbean Perspectives on Producing Celebrity” (Wadabagei, Vol. 12: 2, 2009); and “Of Sacred Crossroads: Cultural Studies and the Sacred” (Open Cultural Studies Vol. 3, No.1, (2019).