For Innocent, the "wake" of Haiti's imperial afterlives is, to borrow from Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe's In the Wake (2016), the trail of a ship, a vigil for the dead, and a coming to consciousness. Haiti, the first Black republic, has lived for more than two centuries inside that wake, in the immediate shadow of the United States.
The plantation, in the sense developed by Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir, persists: garment factories supplying global brands; rice tariffs cut to open a captive market; prisons designed and financed abroad; an image-economy that flattens — technologies refined on Haitian land, life, and labor before circulating outward.
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil presents new commissions tracing how American hegemony, Haiti's manufactured image, and the debt that follows both settle into the ordinary, unnoticed — in objects, memory, and habits of consumption preserved by distance.
These works seek to close the artificial distance between the Caribbean and the Global North, including Scandinavia, asking viewers to reckon with their own place in these currents of global capital. Innocent's presentation, which treats artistic research as a practice of inhabiting sovereignty, positions Haiti as a place of ongoing origin, a living register of endurance, autonomy, and the demand for a world beyond the colonial imagination. This is what Casimir calls the “counter-plantation system”— the sovereign world Haitians have built against the factories, tariffs, and the global currents this exhibition traces, a daily reconstruction of sovereignty against the imperial frames that would otherwise contain it.
This exhibition is curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley and is supported by Arts and Culture Norway.