ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The artist Marton Robinson questions stereotype assertions and constructions of Blackness while also alluding to the complexities of Black identity across geographies. His audiovisual installations, collages, drawings, and performances dismantle and challenge preconceived identifications by transforming them, adopting a geopolitical, economic, and socially informed narrative that resists Black erasure. His images portray strong aversions to how Black bodies, particularly the Black male body is perceived, understood, judged, assessed, valued, and looked upon, using archival material collected from text and images to defy discourses of fixed identity and subjugation.

Using political satire as methodology to ridicule the colonial and racist portrayal of Blackness, Robinson offers nuanced and layered meaning behind the diasporic subject while building new transformative ways of existence within a neoliberal colonial state that profits on the exploitation of subjects. His decolonial perspective, as a Black diasporic Costa Rican artist based in Canada, embraces a visual interpretation of dissent. While considering perceptions of Blackness in Costa Rica that shape its national, cultural, and political imagination, he also encodes messages that defy and question structures of power in North America by disrupting narratives of Blackness. This confrontational process of disentangling harmful stereotypes and racist dogmas, by emphasizing that they exist, becomes relevant at a moment in history when white supremacy and fascism are on the rise. Robinson offers its distortion and questions its iconographic historical reference, studying its contexts and messages through archives and media platforms. He responds with intentionality and oppositional consciousness to denounce police brutality, racial discrimination, and historical markers that perpetuate otherness.

The artworks on display not only reference racist ideologies and their intentions to punish, control, and classify Black bodies but most importantly, to create awareness during critical times when erasure, whitewashing, and the uprising of an oligarchy perpetuate racial and ethnic classifications that need challenging more than ever.

LOCATION

Sur Gallery Exhibition: 39 Queens Quay East, Suite 100

Gallery Hours (during exhibition):

Wednesday - Friday noon-6:00PM

Sat 11 AM-5 PM