Full curatorial statement
Susan Mains Gallery, hosted by Art House 473, is pleased to announce our call for submissions for the 8th Grenada Contemporary Exhibition titled, “Dreevay”. This is in conversation with the Grenada National Pavilion’s call for the Venice Biennale, echoing Koyo Kouoh’s call for quiet attention, listening and contemplative de-centering, “Dreevay” is about embracing the distraction and the sacred errantry described by Édouard Glissant. Sacred errantry, or this important, valuable movement, is not idle roaming, but includes a sense of sacred motivation. To embrace distraction and the potential for new relation is a way of making new meaning of the world.
“Dreevay” a patois word that is popularly translated as “knocking about” involves movement without necessarily knowing where it will lead. Derived from the French, “Dérive”, there have been “theories of distraction” from the likes of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (Debord)
As a complementary call, we are looking for artists to explore this concept of uncovering something new, not necessarily from deep attention to quiet reverberations but to chart a course towards something unknown to deviate from their regular routine and open channels they may not have anticipated unless they chose to wander. Walter Benjamin in, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, seemed to make a case that as forms of art like photography and film were becoming more popular, people have entered into an age of distraction. He seemed to lament the fact that with the accessibility, democratisation, and mass reproducibility of artwork, people seem less focused, less able to contemplate the beautiful. “Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” (Benjamin)
As artists working in 2025 with an eye on these texts from another era, we have a new set of distracting elements to process. Screens, scrolling, artificial intelligence, speed of information, the overwhelming amount of images and data we are frequently absorbed by, how can we employ “Dreevay” to be drawn by the attractions of the “terrain”, digital space now included in our psychogeography.
Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” A museum studies approach to heritage. Routledge, 2018. 226-243.
Debord, Guy. “1958.” Theory of the Dérive”, in Knabb (2006) (2006): 62-66.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
Curriculum:
This anecdote from Plato about Thales, one of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, is a good contemplation on the dialectic between “paying attention” and “being distracted”. The focus here is on the Thracian maid towards the end of this article. Laughter is a rich philosophical topic as I had explored in a seminar with Mladan Dolar , but I chose this article to think through what it means to be distracted.
I chose the article below from the New Yorker particularly with the emphasis on the thought – “Who do we become when we’re distracted”. Some may say that distraction is a way of reclaiming a sense of self or that we are using our time for something we want to do rather than what we are “supposed to be doing” (see Marx and alienation). One of the things I would focus on in this article is the idea of selfhood while engaging in distraction or aimlessness.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-new-theory-of-distraction
I am including this text because I like the question, “Is distraction synonymous with desire?”. Soren Kierkegaard thought that this “longing” or “desire” was a good quality – showing you wanted higher things from life: “Longing is the umbilical cord of the higher life.” How do we resolve the tension that Kierkegaard explores as a father of existentialism that there are things we know we ultimately want, like generally good lives and health etc. but we don’t always do the things we need to do to get there? How can we differentiate the difference between being “tantalized” by the good life vs. fleeting distractions? Have we misunderstood the assignment?
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