ARC Magazine announces the release of its 5^th volume, which presents a collection of works by contemporary artists practicing in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Featured artists and writers from Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Martinique, Cuba, Puerto Rico, St. John, U.S Virgin Islands, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Canada, The Netherlands, The UK, The United States, and Venezuela represent and analyse a variety of media, including photography, illustration, film and video, drawing, sculpture, painting, poetry, performance, installation and mixed media. Purchase Issue here.

From the Anarusha Series by Charl Landvreugd

ARC frames its content in sections: 24FPS presents a review of established and experimental film and video works; THE GRADIENT offers a dissection of a larger body of specified projects; CONVERSATIONS reminisces and heralds the significance of influence and exchanges; SPOTLIGHT highlights emerging artists’ works; and COLLECTIONS showcases the portfolios of four artists. We introduce a defined CULTURE department and REVIEWS, which vacillate between traditional and more expedient views on the place of Caribbean art, as we continue to characterize and determine the function of ARC as a container.

The 5^th issue of ARC brings together a range of artists and writers exploring and experimenting with concepts of Power, Identity, Interpretations of Creolization and Belonging.  First-generation Puerto Rican artist Melissa Calderón’s performances and ephemeral projects, Linger and Nevermine, breed a new reasoning into the nature of nurturing and motherhood. Art critic Tatiana Flores partners with Calderón to build a poignant story of art as surrogate. Goldsmiths’ graduate Charles Campbell investigates the excess and impermanence that is prevalent through the work of Guyanese artist Hew Locke, whose executions of spoils of conquests and colonization are a testament to the fact and fiction of the West Indies, and as performance, they are a powerful regurgitation of the scars of prejudice and power.

Issue 5 also includes a limited edition run of Trinidadian artist Rodell Warner’s Riskzine, which was created in January as a part of a Commonwealth Connections Residency in South Africa. Riskzine observes the widespread repetition of one particular communication in public spaces in Johannesburg, and the phenomenon of its tone and intention finding their way into the everyday vocabulary and interactions of the city. One hundred copies of Riskzine were produced by Rodell Warner for his exhibition ‘Common Room: Observations and comments on public-public communication’, and a further hundred copies for distribution with ARC Magazine Issue 5 in May of 2012.

Featured artist, Surinamese Charl Landvreugd interacts with Dutch scholar, cultural critic and writer Rob Perée to produce Don’t talk Black, Do Black.  Their discourse centres on Black European aesthetics, its intricacies, dynamics and language. By taking historical European art forms and embellishing them through a creolized lens, the artist subverts all meaning, creating personal hybrids that seek to expand upon his lived experiences. Martinican Robert Charlotte’s documentary photographs of cock fighting in Martinique tell a story – not of violence, brutality and gore, but one of a rich tradition defining to the French Territories. The relationship between owner and animal is investigated, and uncommon rural and urban spaces are exposed. With meticulous control of twilight, Charlotte renders a powerful and extremely beautiful look at an animated tradition.

Jamaican jeweller and metal smith Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s recent body of work, ‘Gardening in the Tropics’, highlights the crossing currents of literature, storytelling and mysticism that has enforced the Caribbean space for generations. Here, hybrid creatures speak in minute gestures fraught with tension, beauty and magic. Los Angeles-based writer Oscar Moralde creates a powerful piece on Cuban film, Boleto al Paraiso (Ticket to Paradise), which chronicles the journey of six desperate youths trying to escape to and from Havana. This coming-of-age film is without a happy ending as decay, isolation and depression threaten to defeat its protagonists.

ARC’s most intimate inclusion reveals Lawrence Graham-Brown in his flight into exile, and the performative works that seek to identify the parameters of queer politics and the black nude body. Graham-Brown’s disarming frankness warns us about judgment, isolation and cowardice.  Issue 5 also features the combined results of two ongoing partnerships with DAC Martinique (Ministry of Culture) and the Edna Manley College, School of Visual Arts. Here we present a portfolio of thesis works from 2011 Bachelor of Fine Arts students, while Dominique Brebion shares the mission of the Ministry of Culture in order to identify its rich tradition of regional integration and support.

This collection renders the Caribbean and its peripheral sites as spaces of great complexity, detailing new understandings of how we conceive and relate to our becoming from within and without. The presentation of dialogues and perspectives from the diasporas are particularly pivotal, as they open up our cultural landscape to imaginative and contemporary ideals that often run parallel with our lived realities. These juxtapositions offer tremendous insight into a region that remains challenging, undetermined and forever in transformation.