Jade Montserrat, The Rainbow Tribe: A Place to Call Home

1 - 30 July

Jade Montserrat lives and works in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. She graduated from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2003 and Norwich University of the Arts in 2010. Montserrat is the Stuart Hall Foundation practice-based PhD fellow at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research at The University of Central Lancashire (2017), and Associate Artist in the Holding Space Programme at The Showroom, London (2016). Recent selected exhibitions, screenings, performances and presentations include: Alison Jacques Gallery, London, Arnolfini, and Spike Island, Bristol (2017) and Princeton University (2016). Montserrat works collaboratively with artist and performance collectives including Network 11, Press Room, the Conway Cohort and Rainbow Tribe: Affectionate Movement.

The Rainbow Tribe: A Place To Call Home is a space for rest and reflection, a refusal of the capitalist shock doctrine. The space deflects urgency prompted by quantitive measures of time, labour, function, consumption and emphasises exhaustion as a valid condition of blackness. The Rainbow Tribe: A Place To Call Home takes Josephine Baker’s family experiment as a starting point for locating, utilising and making visible resources to nourish and activate the space; movement between material, a “democratisation of access” (Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive”). The project’s title is taken from Josephine Baker’s pivotal 20th-century experiment ‘The Rainbow Tribe’ in which a group of 12 ethnically-diverse children were adopted by Baker. The project explores Baker’s fairytale-like ideas of a modern mixed-race family within the climate of global 21st-century issues surrounding cultural diversity and political freedom within the context of the Imperial movement. The Rainbow Tribe: A Place To Call Home is an invitation to explore what reparative care within home, community and institutions could look like.