by Dalhousie Art Gallery with support from Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, Christina Leslie & francesca ekwuyasi
Experience two concurrent exhibitions exploring how memory and lived experience are carried and transformed through material, image, sound, and storytelling.
Burnt Sugar Blue, curated by francesca ekwuyasi, presents work by Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, and Christina Leslie that considers intertwined histories of the Black Atlantic through photography, installation, textiles, print, and mixed media.
Roger Mooking: SoundBites brings together visual art, moving image, music, text, and interactive elements in an immersive exploration of creativity, memory, and the rhythms of contemporary life.
Presented by Dalhousie Art Gallery, featuring Roger Mooking, Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, and Christina Leslie. Burnt Sugar Blue is curated by francesca ekwuyasi.
For Nocturne, Dalhousie Art Gallery presents two concurrent exhibitions that invite audiences to move, listen, reflect, and encounter material, image, sound, and storytelling as forms of cultural knowledge.
Burnt Sugar Blue, curated by noted storyteller, writer, and artist francesca ekwuyasi, brings together work by Stina Baudin, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Bushra Junaid, and Christina Leslie. Through photography, installation, textiles, print, and mixed media, the exhibition considers how materials can become repositories of personal and collective memory.
The title invokes sugar and indigo, two materials whose histories are bound to plantation economies, colonial trade, forced labour, inherited knowledge, and resistance. Across their distinct practices, the artists explore migration, displacement, survival, liberation, and creativity, asking how histories are carried and transformed across generations and geographies.
Roger Mooking: SoundBites is the Trinidadian-born Canadian is the acclaimed multidisciplinary artist’s first solo visual art exhibition in Atlantic Canada. Inspired by his 2023 album of the same name, the exhibition draws on the sampling traditions of Hip-Hop. Mooking remixes his own painting, photography, moving image, music, lyrics, and writing to create immersive visual and sonic environments.
Structured in three movements, The Learning, The Living, and The Leaving, SoundBites explores creativity and contemporary life as processes of accumulation, transformation, and exchange. Visitors can engage with interactive elements using their own smartphones and headphones.
A further dialogue between Mooking and ekwuyasi takes place through Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, their collaborative 2023 publication. Bringing together conversations, essays, visual art, photography, lyrics, and short fiction, the book reflects their shared interests in creativity, Blackness, family, food, memory, and loss.
Together, the exhibitions offer a space to linger, listen, and consider the many ways memory and cultural knowledge live within bodies, communities, objects, images, and sound.
Image credit: Left: Adama Delphine Fawundu, Deep Inside I’m Blue, 2018, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Right: Roger Mooking, Aquatic Inferno, 2023, acrylic on canvas and photography. Courtesy of the artist.
Wheelchair accessible - There is an accessible entrance at the front of the building with automated doors (6101 University Avenue). Accessible parking spaces are located on Seymour Street. There are wide lobby spaces within the interior and an elevator to the gallery on the first floor. Accessible washrooms are also located on the second floor.
