Activity An illustrated talk
Host Moray House Trust
Date Thursday 4th October 2018
Desmond Allí is a self-taught artist whose philosophy and political beliefs are deeply embedded in his work.
In an interview some years ago, Desmond explained the logic of this approach, saying; “Art can contribute to social transformation and social education. It can show the pitfalls of every cultural disease in a way that no other art form can. The mind is very impressionable and images have an extremely lasting effect. It is my form of communicating with the world…I want to capture truth in a very raw form. I want to capture the way in which the Guyanese culture is dying a slow death, the decaying social norms and the pollution of our judicial system by corruption.”
“Art in Resistance”, the collective term for Desmond’s early work, is a re-interpretation of our pre and post Columbian history; “done with the deliberate intention of bringing to the fore the grandeur of those past civilizations of the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and the resistance to European cultural imposition.”
More details of this talk and Desmond’s work can be found in the 2018 edition of Ku’wai.