“In the Wake of A Haunting” is a two-person exhibition by La Vaughn Belle (US Virgin Islands) and Tamika Galanis (The Bahamas). La Vaughn Belle is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice “makes visible the unremembered through exploring the material culture of coloniality [by] creating narratives from fragments and silences.” Tamika Galanis is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist whose “work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns.”
“In the Wake of A Haunting” observes the manifestations in both Belle and Galanis’ practices of the lures from the archive, both the landscape and the metaphysical. Hauntings often dredge up fears of the otherworldly, ‘duppies’ and ‘sperrits’; however ideas, concepts, stories, and intriguing information repeatedly come to visit us after being first imparted. The remembering persists and, for some, it becomes motivation to follow the pathways they present.
The haunting is a call to decolonization and the dismantling of systems that keep us fragmented. Belle conjures this fragmentation of body from land, land from atmosphere, archives from people, and people from history and brews new modes of being. She is interested in “elements of the natural world, like the land or sea, powerful forces like the hurricane, for strategies in how to disrupt the colonial gaze and its hierarchies.” While her multilayered, mixed media, and beautifully chaotic works illustrate the landscape in movement affected by turbulent winds. Belle presents the “aesthetics of ruin as a way to reimagine our ‘pastpresents’ and gesture towards new and possible futures.”
For Galanis, the archive has become a haunting turned kin. The visitations came through the unnamed repeated faces appearing in photo archives only attached to a familiar place. She saw a loose thread in slave records, pulled it to Cat Island, an eastern Bahamian island, and was led to the ladder stitch between our archipelago and the American South. Galanis weaves the landscapes of the saltwater railroad together again by investigating the remnants of Gullah Geechee culture in our terrains. Narrowing on the bonds between the Carolinas and The Bahamas, through photography, video and installation, Galanis focuses on the Gullah bottle trees present within our respective spaces that are used to capture ‘sperrits’ that try to invade homes at night. The presence of these bottle trees, which have evolved to decoration, are monuments to the shared ancestral spiritual practices between The Carolinas and The Bahamas.
As researchers, both Belle and Galanis follow the hauntings and listen intently to the calls of the past to unearth and to patch linkages between place and time. They urge their audience to remember and to access collective memory for storytelling, record-keeping and archive-making.
Effluvia, 2024
Medium: 4K Video, 5:02 min
Effluvia was commissioned by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on the occasion of Belle’s solo exhibition in 2023. Shot in the marshes and swamps of South Carolina Belle traverses former rice plantations, sites of slave rebellions to explore what histories ooze from the earth and water.
La Vaughn Belle
La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. Through exploring the material culture of coloniality Belle creates narratives from fragments and silences. Working in a variety of disciplines her practice includes: painting, installation, photography, writing, video and public interventions. Belle holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and BA from Columbia University in NY. She was a finalist for the She Built NYC project to develop a monument to memorialize the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and for the Inequality in Bronze project in Philadelphia to redesign one of the first monuments to an enslaved woman at the Stenton historic house museum. As a 2018-2020 fellow at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women at Columbia University she researched the citizenless Virgin Islanders in the Harlem Renaissance. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO). Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.
Tamika Galanis
Tamika Galanis is a Bahamian-American documentarian and multimedia visual artist, whose work considers the contentious relationship between historical documentary accounts of the Caribbean and lived experience. Galanis earned her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. She is a former Jon B. Lovelace Fellow for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress; the inaugural Post-MFA Fellow of Documentary Arts at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and, former Fellow of Film and Media Studies at Emory University.
Tamika currently splits her time between The Bahamas and Upstate New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University