The Bahamas at the Venice Biennale: The Living Force of Junkanoo and (Posthumous) Collaboration

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Location: 119 DeBartolo Hall (View on map )

Event poster with colorful image used as background

This talk examines the current Bahamas Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, In Another Man's Yard, featuring the work of John Beadle (1964–2024) and Lavar Munroe (b. 1982), as an intervention into prevailing theories of collaboration in contemporary art. It centers on Junkanoo — a centuries-old Bahamian masquerade tradition in which groups collectively transform discarded materials into elaborate costumes through months of shared labor — as a model of collaborative making in which authorship is deferred and distributed. Each act of cutting, fringing, and assembling carries forward the trace of prior labor while opening onto future transformation. The talk focuses particularly on what Munroe describes as his posthumous collaboration with Beadle — incorporating sail material Beadle left in his studio to attend to plans he never lived to realize — and situates this within the broader frame of a Biennale that was itself a posthumous realization of Koyo Kouoh's curatorial vision. I advance a genealogy of collaboration rooted in Caribbean and Black diasporic artistic practice highlighting its potential as a force that moves through materials, persists across generations, and refuses the boundary between the living and the dead.