KINGSTON, Jamaica— The National Gallery of Jamaica announced this afternoon that it has postponed its new flagship exhibition the Kingston Biennial until December 5, 2021. The move, it said, is an acknowledgement of the logistical challenges currently facing the worldwide community due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The exhibition was previously scheduled to open on December 13, 2020.

The theme of the 2021 Kingston Biennial is Pressure, which will feature the work of artists based locally, and in the Caribbean Diaspora, selected by the curatorial team led by David Scott, chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University; founder and editor of the journal Small Axe; and curator of Caribbean Queer Visualities and “The Visual Life of Social Affliction.”

Scott is joined by co-curators O’Neil Lawrence, the chief curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica; Wayne Modest, head of research for material culture for the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, the Afrika Museum and the Wereldmuseum, in the Netherlands; and Nicole Smythe-Johnson, writer, independent curator, and PhD student at the University of Texas, Austin.

The gallery said that the exhibition will be accompanied by extended city-wide programming aimed at provoking engagement and discussion beyond its walls.

“Pressure is a profoundly resonant and vivid term—really a keyword—that maps an interconnected range of historically rooted experiences that evoke an environment burdened with difficulties and hardships,” Scott said, explaining the theme. 

“The whole history of Jamaica could be written as a story of pressure. But it is not a solely passive experience. It’s not a condition undergone, endured, tolerated, and it is not intended to signal a sense of victimhood and victimisation. To the contrary, what is instructive about the Jamaican experience and the idiom of pressure is that it has always had a generative and dissenting quality about it,” he said.

Scott added: “Pressure is a source of critical and creative counter-powers and creative oppositional activity. It is an inspiring human resource, and historically it has been deeply fertile ground for some of the most brilliant works of Jamaican cultural achievement. We will be thinking about and looking at this process in a very contemporary sense. In this endeavour to think about the role of pressure in Jamaican life, the curators will engage with the relation between visual art practice and the larger social, cultural, political and economic life that is our nation, Jamaica.” 

The national gallery said the biennial as an exhibitionary form is a model for showing art to publics. It said the form has grown in significance over the past decade, such that biennials have become “the most important art events in the global art world”.

Biennials have helped put cities on the global cultural map and helped to give voice to otherwise invisible art practices,” Scott said. 

“In our view, Kingston should be part of this global process. As one of the oldest world cities with a varied and vibrant cultural life, Kingston has a lot to offer the global art world. And, as the curators urge, pressure is precisely an idiom in which to accentuate what is most creative in Jamaica,” he added.

Senior director of the National Gallery of Jamaica Dr Jonathan Greenland said the Kingston Biennial is now in line with others around the world.

“We have a great team of curators, a good theme, a lot of talented artists and a complicated global environment so our audiences can expect a fascinating Kingston Biennial in 2021,” he said.  “We were tremendously excited to start the planning of this new venture in 2019 and will continue to work to produce the best possible exhibition for its new date.”