Anina Major: Moments of Being

In the exhibition, Moments of Being, Anina Major continues to engage with Bahamian plaiting as a contemporary practice and considers how states of awareness emerge through the body. African traditions and European influences learned from interrupted rituals, displaced materials, and symbols carried forward without full archival continuity, manifest into sculpture and performance. Resulting in a unique body of work composed of diverse forms, that are both autobiographical and fantastical. By using abstraction, voids in the archive become the place for critical reinvention and renewed cultural work. Within the woven layers rests the significance of preserving cultural memory while simultaneously embodying the complexity of identity. Major’s material of choice, clay, embodies a desire for beauty and a need to commemorate. A seemingly appropriate response to everything that is decaying and growing, that may seem to be destroyed but could never be erased.

This is most notably expressed in Major’s sculptural performance video, These Boots Were Made For Walking, a meditation of fractured cultural connections across the Black diaspora, that adopts body movement as an expression of agency and a form of problem solving. By walking and prancing across a bed of crushed conch and oyster shells interspersed with ceramic mammy shards, Major embraces ruin as a signifier of temporal in‑between‑ness. The performance memorializes the fragility of lost histories while materializing the delicate tension between destruction and perseverance. In contrast the silent architecture of The Forgotten Maidens, a congregation of bodily towers, creates a collective presence, rather than singular monumentality. Their communal stillness heightens the transference of knowledge that occurs within the work. 

These moments emerge not as fixed narratives but as points that coalesce. The body remembers what the archive cannot hold.