Bahamian Pavilion Returns to Venice With Junkanoo, Memory, and John Beadle
After a 13-year absence, the Bahamian Pavilion has returned to Venice with an exhibition that treats national representation as a question of memory, material, and artistic inheritance. Installed at the San Trovaso Art Space in Dorsoduro, “In Another Man’s Yard” centers on the late Bahamian artist John Beadle and his former student Lavar Munroe, using Junkanoo — the islands’ whistling, crepe-costumed procession — as both subject and structure.
The presentation turns Junkanoo into a visual philosophy. Large sculptural works are assembled from strips of discarded costumes, while paintings and installations draw on Beadle’s sketchbooks, studio materials, and sailcloth from Haitian sloops. Munroe also includes his own costume and one once worn by his daughter, placing family memory inside a broader meditation on ritual, loss, and continuity. In one back room, a tiger and a suspended white wave frame the work with a theatrical intensity that never loses sight of the exhibition’s commemorative core.
Beadle, who died in 2024 at 60, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Tyler School of Art, as did Munroe. The two artists shared a commitment to giving found and industrial materials — metal, black iron, tarpaulin, cardboard, and wood — a second life in painting, sculpture, and installation. Beadle’s cardboard cutouts of human and natural forms, often drawn from Junkanoo iconography, appear in the Venice presentation, including “Inverted Tree, Man for Hire” (2004), in which a tree trunk seems to return a piercing gaze.
The project was first envisioned in 2014, one year after the Bahamas’ Venice debut, according to 2026 pavilion curator Krista Thompson. It stalled when government funding was withdrawn, then returned through support from Baha Mar. John Cox, executive director of arts and culture at Baha Mar and co-founder of the Fuse Art Fair, said the pavilion pushes back against the flattened global image of the Bahamas, long reduced to beaches, crystal water, and tourism marketing.
“Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea of a monolithic Bahamas,” Cox said. “If you sit in a room with Bahamians, you go: ‘Whoa — I didn’t know this is what the Bahamas looks like.’”
That corrective impulse gives the pavilion its force. Rather than presenting the Bahamas as a fixed brand, it offers a layered account of cultural life shaped by ritual, migration, labor, and artistic exchange. In the context of the Biennale’s 2026 title, “In Minor Keys,” chosen by Koyo Kouoh, the Bahamian Pavilion reads as a quiet but insistent argument for complexity.
