Santiago Mostyn presented solo exhibition Warming Plateau at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko which ran February 22nd to April 7th.
The installation includes a film in two parts: the first part focuses on the legend of an African witch, Gang Gang Sarah who speaks of “wishing to return to Africa” but also its impossibility. The second part follows four men cutting their way through the jungle. Both are filmed in Tobago which is a former British West Indies island unique in that “much of its West African heritage survived the obliterating effects of slavery and exists in vibrant tradition long into the present day.”
The film and exhibition moves between “sites of past and present activity or exploitation,” and also a series of other works including arranged fluorescent Rayo plants, photographs, and wooden sculptures which to create “connected gestures that relate both to ways of looking at a colonialized past, and to our anthropogenic present.”
There is also a work by the German artist Luise Kimme (1939-2013) who’s subjects were often the Tobagonian body which has been re-appropriated by Mostyn to confront authorship and the “awkward balance between clear tenderness and the inescapable objectification of her subjects.”**
