Leon Wainwright, Art and ‘exchange’ between Suriname
Art and ‘exchange’ between Suriname and the Netherlands This paper is drawn from research in Paramaribo (Suriname) and Rotterdam, in the context of the Dutch and Surinamese official sponsorship which shaped two art exhibitions in 2010. The links between these exhibitions are revealing of the positions that artists of Caribbean backgrounds have come adopt in relation to the patterns of art patronage, curating and reception that culminated with the Suriname-Dutch partnership of ‘cultural exchange’, SPAN. Overall, this field is useful for grasping the matter of artists’ agency and its limits, by showing how artists have coped with perceptions of Caribbeanness and cultural difference in their movements along the axis of connection between Paramaribo and Rotterdam. The processes of transit, transition and transformation through movement are explicit in this account. They help to illuminate the political struggles which underlie the sense of ‘a right to the city’ that is at the centre of these uneven transatlantic relations in the field of the visual arts. Leon Wainwright, Prinicipal Investigator for ‘Sustainable Art Communities’, is Lecturer in Art History at The Open University and Editor-in-Chief of the Open Arts Journal http://openartsjournal.org/. From 2005 to 2012 was a member of the editorial board of the journal Third Text and he has held visiting fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and the Yale Center for British Art. He was OU Principal Investigator for one of the four consortium projects funded by HERA, ‘Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement’ http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/cim/index.shtml (CIM), and PI for ‘Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies and Creativity’ http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/disturbing-pasts/index.shtml (HERA, European Science Foundation). His publications include Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011) and numerous writings on art history, curating and cultural policy. He was recently awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in the History of Art. http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/arthistory/wainwright.shtml