Tamika GalanisVisiting Arts Fellow
Tamika Galanis is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist. A Bahamian native, Tamika’s work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns. Emphasizing the importance of Bahamian cultural identity for cultural preservation, Tamika documents aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics.
Tamika’s photography-based-practice includes traditional documentary work and new media abstractions of written, oral, and archival histories.
Galanis’s work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, the wwww United States, Europe, and throughout the Caribbean with film screenings including the Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, The Bahamas International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, L.A. Film Forum, MOCA Los Angeles, Hong Gah Museum in Taipei, and the inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Festival.
Tamika earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University in 2016. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Post-MFA Documentary Arts Fellowship by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke which culminated with her solo show, One Hurricane Season. In 2019 Galanis was awarded the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship for the study of the Alan Lomax Collection from the American Folk Life and Kluge Centers at the Library of Congress. As the Lovelace-Lomax Fellow, Galanis repatriated the Lomax Bahamian materials, returning them to their communities of origin, naming previously unidentified subjects, and curating an exhibition with selections from the collection—Homecoming: Talking to the Dead was exhibited at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. In 2021 she exhibited new works in the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas’s 8th iteration of the “Double Dutch” series—a two-person show with Trinidadian artist, Rodell Warner—Ancestral: Remains to be Seen.
Tamika splits her time between The Bahamas and the United States. At present she is completing a public artwork commissioned by The World Reimagined Project—a public art education project throughout England examining the impact of Britain’s involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She is also currently in residence at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina where she was awarded a grant, in joint, with fellow Bahamian artist, Anina Major, to conceive of an exhibit highlighting shared histories between Bahamian and Gullah-Geechee cultures.
