Since the 1970s, multidisciplinary queer artist Felix de Rooy has produced an oeuvre demonstrating how the space-time of the Caribbean is far from monolithic linearity. Encompassing poetry, theatre, film, painting, assemblage, digital collage, wall hangings, and curation, de Rooy’s practice flows over the Eurocentric imaginative horizon of what is and how it should be, in what he describes as ‘psychic realism’. In de Rooy’s works, aspects of different spiritualities and aesthetic regimes cohabitate. In Resurrection (1987) and River Spirit (2007), for example, matter and people, as well as their interactions with natural and cosmological worlds, are connected and inextinguishable. Even after pillage, death, ostracization, or injustice, nothing seems to take away their agency to sense, respond, and resist the never-ending ramifications of colonialism. A selection of these defiant works is exhibited in the context of Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld. Love, beauty, longing, and community hold the beings depicted in de Rooy’s work inseparably together. Desire lubricates their inevitable challenges and bonds, spoken in Papiamento in the films Almacita di Desolato (1986), and Ava & Gabriel—Un Historia di Amor (1990). The subjects in de Rooy’s works are backed by their ancestors and the myths and technologies they crafted to exist in ecstasy and in accordance with the many exuberant yet fragmented histories and cultures of the Dutch Caribbean archipelago. The formal and spiritual syncretism central to de Rooy’s practice, and many others from the various art forms of the area, are testament to being from many places and times, inhabited by different bodies, genders, and ethnic groups that maroon away from colonial indices.

Works in the exhibition: Alma Nova (1999), aquarelle, pencil, 24 × 29 cm; Incipit Vita Novis (1999), aquarelle, pencil, 24 × 29 cm; Orpheus in Gaia (1996), mixed-media box with metal hand appendages, 75 × 50 × 24 cm; Resurrection (1987), collage on wood in triangular frame, 110 × 127 cm; The Trip (1971), felt pen on paper, 72 × 70 cm; Cry Suriname (2002), mixed-media, wooden and bone sculpture, two books, 71 × 53 × 29 cm; Tula’s Dream (2008), oil on canvas, 110 × 120 cm; River Spirit (2007), acrylic on spray on canvas, 238 × 119 cm; Icarus (2008), acrylic and oil on canvas, 119 × 238 cm. Courtesy of the artist