Christopher Cozier Lecture: “Itinerant Acts and Suspended Form”

ICA Miami welcomes Christopher Cozier, artist and co-director of Alice Yard, to the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center for a lecture titled “Itinerant Acts and Suspended Form” presented in conjunction with the ICA Miami’s Spring 2022 semester.

In this lecture, Cozier considers the histories of movement and fluidity across water in Caribbean ways of living, imagining, and becoming. In foregrounding the significance of the ocean in the Caribbean and island life-worlds, we will think about the ways in which Caribbean life transgresses boundaries and territories, both physically and mentally.
By proposing an approach to the Caribbean as a space rather than a place, we will resist the logic of imposed social and economic structures—plantation to the nation-state or institutional gazes—that mandate fixed static singularity. Space, instead, emphasizes itinerant acts, movements in which people dodge or breach. As “critical spaces” derived from shared historical and contemporary experiences, Caribbean spaces conjure assembly and creative actions. This seminar explores these spaces of itinerancy alongside “geographies of production” untethered from territorial and epistemological signifiers. Instead, we will think of suspended forms, and what it means to be afloat, both literally and conceptually.

About Christopher Cozier
Christopher Cozier (b. 1959, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is an artist and co-director of Alice Yard, a collective, which will be participating in documenta 15. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004 and is a Prince Claus Award laureate, 2013. Through his notebook drawings to installations derived from recorded staged actions, Cozier investigates how Caribbean historical and current experiences can inform understandings of the wider contemporary world. Exhibitions include the 5th & 7th Havana Biennials, “Infinite Island,” The Brooklyn Museum (2007); “Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic” (2010), TATE Liverpool; “Entanglements” at the Broad Museum, Michigan (2015); “Relational Undercurrents” at MOLAA. L.A. (2017); and “The Sea is History,” Historiskmuseum, Oslo (2019). Cozier participated in the public program of 10th Berlin Biennial (2018), exhibited in the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019), the 11th Liverpool Biennial (2021), Industrial Art Biennial, Croatia (2020), and currently in “Más Allá, el Mar Canta (Beyond, the Sea Sings)” at the Times Art Center, Berlin, as well as “Fragments of Epic Memory” at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and “Experiences of Oil” at the Stavanger Museum, Norway.

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