About the Show | Audio Guides | Gallery Views | Show Materials| Credits and Acknowledgements
The Whole World is Turning, 2019 (Still) Digital video, performance, 21 minutes and 1 second.
Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Statement
I use filmmaking and video installation to hold all my working interests; masquerade, storytelling, performance, poetry, textiles, video and music.
I am curious about the ways storytelling can limit, enable, and complicate identity formation. My work imagines grief, elegy writing and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by different entangled experiences of crisis (personal, climate, etc.). With my work, I stay with the uncertainty of what crisis does to our bodies and how we might retell our stories accordingly.
The desires I have for my practice are deeply entangled with my relationship to the sea. Being raised in Barbados, floundering between the calm of the Caribbean Sea and the turbulence of the
Atlantic, I am reminded of how much dissonance the sea can hold. That complicated abundance is what I strive for in the way that I work. Through collaboration, I make space for all the complicated voices, bodies and experiences with whom I share love. The work also makes space for grief for those of us with our bodies and lifeworlds on the line.
Recently, I’ve been reaching for what it might to be queer and trans in the Caribbean; what I describe as living a life “too far out” discreetly “below the surface,” on the edges of islands, seas,
respectability, gender and beyond. Considering discretion, how do I hold space for all this queer life in my work in ways that are not endangering? How do I visualise discreet lives discreetly? These questions resonate with parts of my practice, especially masquerade, costuming and video techniques (like digital keying). I enjoy techniques that can help me obscure, abstract, redress, transform and complicate surfaces and bodies.
What I look for with my work is what I love both about the sea and queer life in the Caribbean. Storytelling, costuming and video help me to imagine bodies differently and life beyond horizons, to see a way when there is none and to be reminded of a capacity for change.
Artist Bio
Ada M. Patterson (b. 1994, Bridgetown) (they/she) is an artist and writer based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable and complicate identity formation. Her recent work considers grief, elegy writing and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by different experiences of crisis. Patterson was the 2020 NLS Kingston Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow. Recent exhibitions include Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now at Tate Britain, London and The Whole World is Turning at TENT, Rotterdam.
