Petrine Archer [.com]

Diaspora artist Albert Chong was present to answer questions at the opening of his exhibition at the Mutual Gallery in Kingston last night. The show offered a selection of the artist's most successful photographs and prints on canvas from years past, as well as new works on tile and an installation featuring a hand cart and palm leaves. Whereas Chong's earliest works were shot through with nostalgia and a longing for 'home', by including his most recent works that are photographic compositions on stone tiles, he showed how his ideals have become less sentimental, more earth-bound, radicalized and edgier. His use of the camera that was once focussed on the self, the intimate, and the personal, has set aside ego to consider a greater good, challenging what the artist considers 'the most pressing issues of our time.' Chong explained how recent works such as Hope Deferred (2011) shown here, reflect his interest in world affairs and America's two unpopular wars. His exhibition, almost retrospective in its selection, offers a glimpse into his life and thought in pictures that embrace both nostalgic idealism and a healthy dose of political realism.

The catalog arrived only recently by mail, although the exhibition took place in Ethiopia during the summer. Yet it is extensive enough to give the viewer an understanding of Jamaican born artist/author Danijah Tafari's recent work and display. Every page brims with the energy of his new technique that forgoes formal photographic representation to capture the play of light and energy in increasingly technology overloaded cityscapes of Kingston, London, Paris and New York. In his personal statement, the artist calls his process 'drawing and painting with light', using traditional medium format cameras. He explains why his recent images such as Ethereal Body shown here, fall outside of mainstream taste and have more often been discarded by professional photo labs that consider them rejects. Yet, Danijah Tafari is drawn to what these single exposure photographs that have not been digitally enhanced communicate about the ethereal and electric auras that pervade the atmosphere around us. The idea of presenting that which is normally unseen, appeals to this artist who has long since been attracted to rastafari philosophy and a deep concern for humanity. The catalogue does not tell us how this exhibition came to take place in Addis Ababa but we sense that these brilliant images and the artist have found a spiritual home in that city of light.

Visiting Curacao's  Kura Hulanda Museum  devoted to slavery should be compulsory. It's a specialist museum with collections that focus on the African slave trade and the fate of displaced blacks once transported to the New World. Beginning with a small display that documents man's earliest civilisations, the viewer is invited to meander through galleries that move through time and space telling the story of Europe's intervention in Africa; the establishment of the triangular trade in sugar, cotton and human chattel, and the attrocities that attended the Middle Passage crossing from that continent to the Americas. Collections are rich with historical artifacts as well as life-size installations that invoke the horrors of bondage. In later galleries devoted to the 20th century, viewers come to see how resistance to slavery and Jim Crow oppression were directly tied to the emergence of political movements such as Marcus Garvey's UNIA and Stokely Carmichael's Black Panthers. Finally, the display ends with exquisitely curated modern spaces filled with African artifacts that emphasise Africa's heritage and a culture that its African Diaspora can be proud of. The Kura Hulanda Museum provides an education that no one should miss – an alternative to Disney World – that shows how we are all implicated in this history of wealth and woe. View more pictures from the museum

The organisers of a recent Black Atlantic conference in Liverpool have launched a site devoted to the subject where all the materials from the conference as well as more useful resources can be found. The site, Black Atlantic Resource established by the University of Liverpool was inspired by the exhibition and publication Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic that took place at the TATE Liverpool in the spring. The Resource offers artists profiles, research documents, videos, podcasts, a blog and an extensive bibliography all related to the African Diaspora. It's a fairly ambitious site for a subject that has received insufficient attention, especially in the UK and it is significant that it has been launched in Liverpool, a city with such questionable connections to the history of slavery. If it can be sustained, it might prove to be an important archive for scholars interested in black art now..., take a look, it's worth a visit.

“This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years...” Barrack Obama, ‘A More Perfect Union’, March 2008 This past year, I have been glued to US cable news, following the presidential campaign and Barack Obama’s election. During the primaries, I was struck by the debates surrounding Barrack Obama and his relationship to his pastor Jeremiah Wright which Obama handled so deftly and conclusively severing his relationship because of his pastor’s controversial sermons. Even so, while the debate was still raging, I came to see that its unfolding narrative had parallels in the Caribbean. You see the people of the Caribbean share with African Americans a similar history related to slavery, violence and racial discrimination because we are all part of the same black Diaspora. Our racial identities and sense of 'blackness' follow a similar path traced from the western coastlines of Africa, through to the auction blocks and plantations of the New World.