Ryan Christopher
Ryan Christopher, Of Rain of Sun and of Fountain (Detail), Painting, 2021. Courtesy: Ryan Christopher
Ryan Christopher considers creoleness, composition, the ‘body of Christ’, the hidden and the peripheral. For Coventry Biennial: HYPER-POSSIBLE, he’ll present works spanning a broad range of media including sculpture, painting, video, and installation. Through these objects, materials, sounds and images, fragmentary narratives of renewal, relation, creoleness and diasporic poetics coalesce and creolise – he’ll draw connections between his ongoing interests in theological anthropology, horticulture, reflective film, Antillean literature and postcolonial theory.
The works engage with several thinkers throughout history, with strong references to Suzanne Césaire, Augustine of Hippo, Édouard Glissant and Robert Bresson. These thinkers, among others, speak a language which permeates the forms, compositions, and relationships within the work; a language that favours the poetic act of making as a process embracing chance, subtlety, paradox, and variation.
The history of the city leaves traces within the works, from references to Jesus’ hands in ‘Ecce Homo’ in the old Cathedral, to the conceptual legacies of Art & Language, and the discourses on race within the BLK Art Group. In essence, the works address complexity through a poetic economy of gestures and words, thinking through questions of emancipation and possibility, and amalgamating ideas that materialise into silent, creolised forms.
The Creole Garden, available to watch below, will be exhibited at the Old Grammar School during HYPER-POSSIBLE:
Ryan also had a discussion with fellow exhibiting artist Matthew Krishanu about painting, their inspirations and experiences in our first communiqué, this conversation can be read from page 22 of this publication.