Marking the second presentation of The Bahamas at the Venice Biennale following a 13-year hiatus, the Pavilion is an intergenerational dialogue between Bahamian artists John Beadle (1964\u20132024) and Lavar Munroe (b. 1982), curated by Dr. Krista Thompson. Both artists\u2019 practices are grounded in the visual and social traditions of The Bahamas and the broader African diaspora, engaging in themes of collaboration, commemoration, and material transformation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Beadle was a revered figure within The Bahamas\u2019 artistic community and an inspiration to many, including Munroe. He was part of a community of makers who create costumes for Junkanoo, the centuries-old biannual national processional festival, which he described as \u201cthe cultural bedrock of The Bahamas.\u201d Junkanoo informed his commitment to collaborative artmaking and his use of discarded materials such as cardboard, as seen in works such as Cuffed, Held in Check\u00a0(2018) and\u00a0Body Space III: Under Lock and Key\u00a0(2012). Through these materials and recurring motifs seen throughout the exhibition\u2014dysfunctional oars, mobile houses, and concealed cutlasses\u2014he drew attention to people, things, and artistic processes often disregarded. Munroe has similarly worked at the intersection of Junkanoo and contemporary art, often using discarded\u00a0cardboard and abandoned\u00a0Junkanoo costumes.<\/p>\n
The exhibition foregrounds Junkanoo\u2019s memorial and spiritual dimensions\u2014when a member of its community passes, performers gather to honor the deceased. The Pavilion commemorates Beadle through No Matter How Dreary and Gray, We People of Flesh and Blood Would Rather Live Here, Than in Another Man’s Yard\u00a0(2026), an 11-panel monumental painting by Munroe depicting a memorial procession, based on photographs by Bahamian\u00a0photographer Jackson Petit. This work extends Munroe\u2019s broader engagement with spiritual practices developed through recent trips to Tanzania, Senegal, and\u00a0Zimbabwe. The exhibition features distinct sections devoted to Beadle and Munroe alongside collaborative works from the\u00a0Jammin\u00a0series\u00a0(in honour of Jackson Burnside III and Brent Malone)\u00a0(2014), which Beadle produced with Antonius Roberts and\u00a0Stan Burnside as part of the Junkanoo-based Jammin collective.\u00a0However Long the Night, the Dawn Will Break\u00a0(2026) is a posthumous collaboration that sees Munroe incorporate materials\u00a0recovered from\u00a0Beadle\u2019s studio\u00a0after\u00a0his\u00a0passing, including sail material from Haitian sloops. Munroe began this practice to honor his late father, creating works based on unrealized plans he had to collaborate with him and using materials related to his profession as a parasail operator.<\/p>\n
Resonating with the 2026 Venice Biennale’s overarching theme, In Minor Keys, envisioned by the late Koyo Kouoh, which celebrates\u00a0\u201cartists who work at the boundaries of form and whose practices can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms,\u201d Thompson\u2019s curatorial approach offers a distinctly Bahamian interpretation of this sentiment. The Pavilion highlights Beadle’s and Munroe’s use of discarded materials and collaborative processes to call attention to the hidden, the undervalued, \u201cthe minor\u00a0keys,\u201d in society and in the art world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marking the second presentation of The Bahamas at the Venice Biennale following a 13-year hiatus, the Pavilion is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-428999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}