Crop Over (7)

"Crop Over" is a split- screen video installation featuring the sounds of Crop Over Festival, Wildey House (Barbados) and Harewood House (United Kingdom). It includes interviews and archival material, as well as video footage of Barbadian folk characters and intangible cultural heritage including Mother Sally, Donkey Man, Shaggy Bear, Tuk Band, Tilt / Stilt man and the Landship. This video and accompanying photographic installation was exhibited at Harewood House, Leeds in late 2007 as a part of their programming to reflect on and commemorate the two hundredth year of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. The Barbados Museum & Historical Society and the then National Art Gallery Committee in Barbados were partners in this project, and the installation was exhibited at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society in July 2008 as an intervention into the Cunard Gallery. Since that time the work has been shown in a number of important exhibitions internationally including "Prospect 4: The Lily in Spite of the Swamp" (New Orleans, 2018) and the 2018 retrospective of Boyce's work at the Manchester Gallery of Art. "Crop Over" goes beyond a visual presentation of this historic festival, and into an investigation of diasporic belonging and in/visibility, the role of gender in carnival, and visitor participation in intangible cultural heritage practices. Allison Thompson (2009) in the Small Axe article, "Sonia Boyce and Crop Over" reflects on the work, stating: "Boyce's Crop Over is motivated by what remains unexplained: the story of the Mother Sally that Boyce's own mother never relayed, the rituals of the Landship friendly society of which Boyce had heard only mention, the histories of popular culture that need to be guarded; the unexplained, Boyce says, remains an important aspect of this work. As does hybridity. Crop Over presents a multitude of voices, not just the artist's but other opposing explanations and contesting stances."