Caribbean Atlantean: A solo-exhibition by Risée Chaderton-Charles

“NOW OPEN! Come on down to the Barbados Museum & Historical Society and experience Caribbean Atlantean, a solo exhibition by Barbadian artist Risée Chaderton-Charles.

What if those who were cast into the sea did not disappear? Caribbean Atlantean invites audiences to reconsider Barbados’ history, identity and the stories we carry into the future.

Drawing from research into Barbados’ colonial archives, Risée Chaderton-Charles transforms one of the Atlantic world’s greatest sites of historical trauma into a place of survival, memory, and possibility.

Shipping records, plantation ledgers, insurance claims, and newspapers, documents that once reduced African lives to property, are reclaimed within luminous underwater worlds inhabited by Black Caribbean merpeople, mothers, children, guardians, and ancestral beings. Rather than accepting these archives as the final account of history, Chaderton-Charles asks a powerful question: What if those who were cast into the sea did not disappear?

In this imagined Atlantic world, histories of trauma are reimagined through survival, memory and possibility. The exhibition asks us to look beyond the archives as the final account of the past and consider the power of imagination in shaping the stories we tell about ourselves.

As Barbados reflects on 60 years of Independence and five years as a Republic, Caribbean Atlantean offers a hopeful vision of Caribbean identity, rooted in resilience, imagination and the freedom to create new stories.

There’s more beneath the surface. Swipe and scan the QR code to explore the exhibition catalogue.

Come explore Caribbean Atlantean and encounter a different vision of the Caribbean beneath the surface.”