Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is pleased to announce Beyond Representation, an ongoing digital research project and performance series investigating a broad range of performance and performative practices by artists from the Caribbean and of Caribbean descent working in the region or its diasporas. Presented by the museum’s Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) and curated by Iberia Pérez González, Beyond Representation features an intergenerational group of artists who employ the body or rely on bodily experience and live action to critically engage with the social, political, and cultural reality of their respective contexts. The fall 2024 performance art series debuts on September 21, 2024, and features live art events by artists Jeannette Ehlers and Tirzo Martha.
Focusing on process, audience participation, and examining the relationship with space, matter, or other media, the artists featured in Beyond Representation create work that redefine traditional art-making practices. Jeannette Ehlers and Tirzo Martha’s performances collectively expose and refuse oppressive colonial ideologies while creating multiple narratives of freedom, healing, solidarity, and joy.
Accompanying the onsite performance events at PAMM, the online component of Beyond Representation highlights the abundant contributions of Caribbean creatives to avant-garde performance art. Video works by Jeannette Ehlers, Tirzo Martha, Carlos Martiel, Viveca Vázquez, and Merián Soto will be released on September 26 via PAMMTV, the museum’s first-of-its-kind streaming service that delivers video art from the museum to audiences wherever they are, free of charge. Visit www.pamm.tv for videos and more information.
Beyond Representation is organized by Iberia Pérez González, Andrew W. Mellon Caribbean Cultural Institute Curatorial Associate, with the assistance of the PAMM Education Department and Digital Engagement Department. This exhibition is presented by PAMM’s Caribbean Cultural Institute. Pérez Art Museum Miami’s digital initiatives are funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Beyond Representation Fall 2024 Programming Presented by CCI
Jeannette Ehlers: We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls)
Braiding Circle | September 21, 1–4pm
This presentation of Ehlers’ We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls) invites the local Afro-Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora community throughout Miami to collaborate on the work by participating in a braiding circle. Participants will have the opportunity to take part in the creation of six 52-foot-long braids that will be used by the performers during the live event on September 26. RSVP here.
Jeannette Ehlers: We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls)
Live Performance | September 26, 5–8pm
In the durational performance We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls), Ehlers employs hair, an important identity marker among the African diaspora, as a simple yet powerful gesture. Connected to PAMM’s third-floor terrace by long cornrows, the performers move back and forth, slowly but insistently. Blending in with the hanging gardens, the hair creates a poetic metaphor for the relationship between culture and nature, body and landscape, history and the present. RSVP here.
Grief and strength are present in equal measure in this meditative performance. Accompanied by the sound of the roar of the Atlantic Ocean, it expresses a yearning for life outside the plantation system, and for the forest as a literal and symbolic sanctuary. We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls) was originally commissioned by Mads Norgaard and first performed in November 2021.
Tirzo Martha: Act of Valor
Virtual and In-Person Workshops | October–November
Collective Performance | November 7
Taking as a point of departure, the figure of Captain Caribbean, an artistic persona that emerged in Martha’s practice in 2009, the artist and interested participants will reflect on contemporary issues (climate change, war, displacement, hunger, community breakdown, racism) and consider the desire to possess beyond natural powers to bring about change for a better world. Through a series of virtual and in-person workshop sessions, they will define qualities and characteristics of superheroes that will then be designed and shaped into costumes utilizing various materials. Participants will develop individual performances with the artist, which will then fuse into one collective performance presented to the public.
More information on dates and times for Tirzo Martha’s workshops and performance will be available soon.
ABOUT JEANNETTE EHLERS
Jeannette Ehlers is an artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent based in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in 2006. Ehlers’s practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her works often deal with decolonial hauntings, and she insists on the possibility of empowerment and healing in her art, honoring the legacy of resistance in the African diaspora. She unites the historical, the collective, and the rebellious with the familial, the bodily, and the poetic. In the words of writer Lesley-Ann Brown, “Ehlers reminds everyone who participates in or looks at her work that history is not past.”
Ehlers was nominated to create a national monument to the Windrush generation at London Waterloo station in 2021 as well as a decolonial monument in Braunschweig Germany, in 2023. She is co-creator with La Vaughn Belle of the I Am Queen Mary transnational public art project (2018). She has participated in numerous group shows internationally. Her solo exhibitions include Crossing Waters: Ripples of Tomorrow at Le Bicolore (2024); Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2022); Take Root at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021); Whip it Good: Spinning from History’s Filthy Mind at Autograph ABP in London (2015); and Say It Loud! at Nikolaj Kunsthal (2014).
ABOUT TIRZO MARTHA
Tirzo Martha’s prolific body of work spans sculpture, video, installation, and performance art. His urge and need to create art has its origin not only in his ability to be creative but also in his humanitarian and social engagement. Although his presentations vary greatly in appearance, his social involvement and the way in which he involves his audience both directly and indirectly in his creative process are common threads in his works.
Martha studied art at the Akademia di Arte Kòrsou before moving to the Netherlands to study fashion and visual art. He returned to Curaçao in 1991. In 2006, he cofounded the Instituto Buena Bista (IBB), a center for contemporary art in Curaçao and a platform dedicated to art and education.
Martha has had many solo exhibitions, including in the Netherlands at the Museum van Bommel van Dam in Venlo, Museum Beelden aan Zee in The Hague, and CODA Museum in Apeldoorn; in Curaçao at the Museo di Kòrsou; in the United States at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami; and in France at Paris Fashion Week 2020. His work also has been featured in group exhibitions, including at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in the Netherlands, HYBRID CULTURES in Amsterdam, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, the Hong-gah Museum in Taiwan, the Museum of Fine Arts in Split, Croatia; and the Havana Biennial.
ABOUT THE CARIBBEAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE
The Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) is a curatorial and research platform at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) dedicated to promoting and supporting the artistic and cultural production of the Caribbean and its diasporas through exhibitions, fellowships, public programs, and collection development.
ABOUT KNIGHT FOUNDATION
The Knight Foundation are social investors who support democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts, and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and in the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once had newspapers. Learn more at kf.org and follow @knightfdn on social media.
ABOUT PAMMTV
Founded in 2023, PAMMTV is Pérez Art Museum Miami’s streaming gallery for video art, amplifying landmark media from South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and African Diaspora. Through PAMMTV, audiences anywhere can discover boundary-pushing, international media from PAMM’s collection, alongside selections from film festivals, guest curators, and regional filmmakers. Anyone around the world can access PAMMTV for free by visiting www.pamm.tv and creating an account. Create a PAMMTV™ account to start watching now.
ABOUT PAMM
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), led by Director Franklin Sirmans, promotes artistic expression and the exchange of ideas, advancing public knowledge and appreciation of art, architecture, and design, and reflecting the diverse community of its pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas. The 40-year-old South Florida institution, formerly known as Miami Art Museum (MAM), opened a new building, designed by world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron, on December 4, 2013 in Downtown Miami’s Maurice A. Ferré Park.
The facility is a state-of-the-art model for sustainable museum design and progressive programming and features 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor program space with flexible galleries; shaded outdoor verandas; a waterfront restaurant and bar; a museum shop; and an education center with a library, media lab, and classroom spaces.
