David Frohnapfel

The dissertation project 'Infinite Island. Contemporary Caribbean Art between autonomous musealization and foreign presentation' aims to juxtapose the autonomous off-spaces or "Ghetto museums" by the Haitian art collective 'Atis Rezistans' in a Slum in Port-au-Prince with institutional musealizations of the same objects in European and North American art exhibitions. In this comparative analysis the project seeks to develop new curatorial strategies to present and translate contemporary art objects for a Western audience, taking Afro-Caribbean religious worldviews into account. The creolization and appropriation of the western art discourse in the Caribbean space and the elitist demarcation from academically trained artists to supposedly "traditional" art forms such as handicraft are often understood as a progressive and an evolutionary development form traditional and religious cultures to a secular, western understanding of art. The dissertations project, however, seeks to retrace how traditional points of reference are still vivid and can be integrated in new, modern developments. This process was labeled multi-temporal heterogeneity by Néstor García Canclini and is visualized in the complex and diverse art works by the Haitian art collective 'Atis Rezistans'.