Bermuda Biennial 2020

Arié Haziza - Wild Randomness (Tryptich)

The 2020 Bermuda Biennial was launched in front of a modest crowd of members on March 5 at The Bermuda National Gallery. The lack of a crowd was unfortunate because the show turned out to be one of the strongest put on by the gallery in several years.

Entitled Let Me Tell You Something, this year’s theme was inspired by a quote from the late American author and Pulitzer Prize winner, Toni Morrison, and overseen by a jury made up of Dr Kimberli Grant, the McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, and Melissa Messina, an independent curator and curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate.

For the fourteenth exhibition, artists who are either residents of Bermuda or of Bermudian heritage were invited to tell a story, offer history or wisdom through a visual medium. More than 50 artists submitted works of which 21 were eventually chosen to participate. We are glad the judges exercised their discretion well and limited the final number of pieces because the ones that eventually made it into the show were of exceptionally high standard particularly when you consider the size of the population from which the artists were pulled. Artists featured this year included the Centipede Art Movement, Dianni Culltar, Katie Ewles, Naimah Frith, Jayde Gibbons, Charlie Godet Thomas, Antoine A.R. Hunt, Christina Hutchings, Cynthia Kirkwood, Jon Legere, Sidney Mello, Bryan Ritchie, Flurina Sokoll, Emma Steele, Andrea Sundt, and Catherine White.

The artworks consisted of contemporary, performance-based works, collage, painting, photography and sculpture, and our favourites were Edwin Smith's mural in his signature monochromatic colours made of duct tape, the fluid lines of Cynthia Kirkwood’s mystery writing, the effective simplicity of Michael Walsh’s embossed skeleton, the random precision of the numbers, lines and graphs of Arié Haziza’s triptych and Gherdai Hassell’s vibrant collage.