Building new legacies with Black North American artists at Dal’s newest art showcase

Five Black North American artists are having their work featured across two exhibits at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. 

Exhibitions “Roger Mooking: SoundBites” and “Burnt Sugar Blue” will run alongside each other at the gallery from Sept. 11 to Nov. 8. 

“SoundBites” features work by Roger Mooking, a Juno Award-winning musician, chef, author and artist. He describes the installation as an interactive and immersive portal about the chaos of being human.

The exhibit originated as a music album in 2023, made for “an attention-deficit world” with 19 tracks shorter than 90 seconds, according to Mooking’s website. 

The album then led to the collaborative book, Curious Sounds: – A Dialogue in Three Movements, which he wrote alongside Francesca Ekwuyasi, the curator of “Burnt Sugar Blue.” 

“The book was born out of wanting to have an art gallery exhibit in your palm,” Mooking said in an email to the Dalhousie Gazette.

The book’s exhibit vibes have now materialized at Dal. It ties in visual arts, music, text and moving images as ideas connect through chaotic and immersive experiences while remaining united by a shared world of short attention spans.

This is the exhibition’s first national tour since it opened at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2024. Mooking says the exhibit is meant to show his own reflection of the world. 

He hopes pieces of the show will resonate with or challenge its audience as it’s meant to “mirror the madness of living,” and lets its viewers “latch onto strings of thought that [are] seemingly disparate but very connected.” 

“Burnt Sugar Blue” showcases art from four Black, female artists

The exhibit curates a space for Black female artists to share their ancestral knowledge and demonstrate how the contemporary world shapes an understanding of self and belonging. It is Ekwuyasi’s second exhibit inspired by the history of sugar and the Black Atlantic. 

“I want to spend time with these artists’ work in a space and see what conversations emerge between the pieces, between the artists,” says Ekwuyasi. 

“Burnt Sugar Blue” features four female Black North American artists: Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid and Christina Leslie, who all share their work and voices in a collective conversation about their ancestry and their identities.

Ekwuyasi spent time in Osogbo, Nigeria, learning about the process of creating indigo dye, which inspired the “Burnt Sugar” exhibition. 

“Burnt Sugar Blue” began as “Burnt Sugar” at the Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Toronto in 2024. The title was modified to include the history of sugar in the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the historic significance of the indigo-dye process. 

“People were enslaved because of their knowledge of indigo and were forced to process indigo in large industrial quantities,” says Ekwuyasi. 

Leslie’s image Hope and Present Chapter: Free tells the story of two 18th-century enslaved Jamaican girls, named Hope and Present. Their story resonated with Leslie, who recreated their escape journey with photography. She then printed the image in sugar cane, a difficult process she says is very dear to her heart.

Her series focuses on Jamaican trade and her own Canadian-Jamaican heritage. 

“Showing the work specifically in Nova Scotia is important to the story and the artists,” says Leslie. “There is rich history within the migration of the Jamaican Maroons, the Atlantic trading port and the wider African community within Nova Scotia.” 

“I’m building a legacy to speak about this too, for generations to come, so that we could do better.” 

 Baudin’s series reappropriates empirical, colonial graphs to help Black people find their way in the world.

She hopes other Black people will see themselves in the work, or develop an understanding of what she’s trying to do around her own Black identity.