A piano without a player in a dimly lit room plays dramatic tunes. What you see next as you enter a larger space is an open field of turf, with a totemic statue standing in the middle as a syncretic idol, combining aspects and aesthetics from different cultures and religions. Over this highly symbolic scenery, neon runs along the wall, intermittently illuminating words, fragments of sense or a poem interrupted or perhaps merely evoked. For “Starless Midnight,” Tavares Strachan’s latest show at Marian Goodman Gallery, the Bahamian conceptual artist has choreographed a complex sensorial and symbolic storytelling that unfolds throughout the gallery’s new Tribeca space, morphing and transforming it into a theatrical setting of disconnected narrations. Although deeply symbolic and evocative, the storytelling that Strachan stages throughout the space is intentionally fragmentary and suspended.
“The work is always about navigation—how we move through space, time and the stories that shape our existence,” the artist told Observer when we spoke after the opening. “There’s no single narrative, but rather an unfolding of connections, ruptures and reimaginings.” Strachan, in his practice, has long been interested in how stories are told, staged and manipulated to shape history. As the artist explains, he wanted visitors to experience and surrender to this fragmentation because history itself is fragmented—what we know is often dictated by what has been preserved or erased. “The goal is to create a sense of dislocation, where visitors feel the weight of forgotten or hidden histories while also being encouraged to map their own pathways through the work.”
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The sculptures Strachan has staged in the different galleries appear as symbolic relics suspended between an ancestral past and an approaching cosmic future. Deliberately drawing from ancient traditions and spirituality, they seem able to establish a more spontaneous and natural relationship with that symbolic world: a level of reality that speaks through universal symbols and archetypes, directly linked to the mystery and miracle of nature—but which modern man has lost, as Carl Jung argued.
Standing on an open field of rice grass is a near-life-size ceramic of the musician and artist Exuma. Although clearly contemporary in its crafting and aesthetic, it holds a totemic and numinous presence. Running along the top of the wall is a colorful neon, which intermittently illuminates with a dim light a quote by James Baldwin that begins, ‘You could be that person…’
“These sculptures exist in an in-between space—between past and future, the earthly and the cosmic, the known and the unknown,” Strachan said. “They function as both artifacts and possibilities, simultaneously grounding us in ancestral knowledge and propelling us toward speculative futures.” Here, the artist is acting as a contemporary archeologist, with works that pursue a return to the ritualistic and spiritual function that artifacts once had—created when humans felt the need to make something symbolic, not directly related to survival but belonging to the realm of imagination, a tool to try to address some of the biggest mysteries of the universe and our existence within. “They draw from spiritual traditions because those traditions are technologies of understanding—ways in which cultures have attempted to decode the universe,” he continued, making clear how his approach to artistic practice and creation links and resonates with the ancient Greek techné—a term that could be simultaneously translated as craft, art or skill, though its meaning is much broader: it encompasses both practical and intellectual activities that involve making or creating something according to a certain set of rules or knowledge.
The Greek term techne is, in fact, intrinsically connected to the human ability to shape the world and understand the natural and social orders through active participation and creation. It is a form of practical knowledge, opposed to the more philosophical and theoretical episteme, which learns by exploring and investigating the world in close connection with its physical nature to reach and capture its deepest energetic and spiritual essence. “In this sense, the sculptures are both characters and vessels—narrative carriers that hold the weight of time and speculation.”
Across cultures, since the early stages of civilization, craftsmanship—whether in pottery, sculpture or architecture—allowed humans to express their culture, beliefs and values through material creations. Through techné, human beings could articulate their vision of the world, whether through functional objects that served practical needs or symbolic works that conveyed deeper meanings or narratives that relied on beauty to contrast the inherent chaos of the universe.
Among those technologies, instruments are the only ones that can also be tools of expression, using sound as a human would. While melodies can convey emotions, stories and cultural values that transcend words, instruments were originally used to replicate natural processes or enhance human interaction with nature. In shamanistic rituals across cultures and latitudes, rhythms and sounds helped to induce altered states of consciousness, allowing communication with the spirits of nature and reconnection with the earth, animals and natural forces.
In Strachan’s orchestration, musical instruments, devoid of human players, are animated by spirits that reclaim their original spiritual significance—long suppressed by ethnographic museum practices and the Western-centric approach that erased both the instruments’ creators and their purpose. Through this reappropriation, the spirits restore the instruments’ neglected cultural and spiritual value, challenging the erasure and distortion imposed by colonial frameworks. “Sound is an invisible force, a vibration that exists between presence and absence,” reflected Strachan. “The ghostly nature of the instruments reflects this—it’s about resonance, about what lingers even after the physical body is no longer there.”
In the show, they function as both artifacts and activators, making the unseen audible. “Sound, like history, carries echoes of the past into the future,” he said. “The instruments exist as bridges between ancient storytelling traditions and modern technological innovations, where oral history and data-driven narratives merge.”
Another recurring theme in the exhibition is how our reliance on those data-driven constructions of reality are shaping our entire understanding of history from the past to the future. With a focus on revealing the threats of manipulation and erasure that come with this, the works upstairs reflect Strachan’s project, “The Encyclopedia of Invisibility.” Driven by a fascination with archives and conceived as a recollection of forgotten and invisible stories, the project questions the fragility of both historical and contemporary narratives, straddling the divide between written traditions and data-driven interpretations, transformation and erasure.
“‘The Encyclopedia of Invisibility’ is an ongoing project—an attempt to catalog what has been left out,” Strachan said. “It challenges the authority of historical narratives by asking: Who decides what is remembered? What happens to those who remain unseen?” In this context, existing at the intersection of text, image and mythology—and drawing from everything from scientific discovery to folklore—the works in the exhibition act as a visual archive, illuminating what has been omitted, whether through systemic erasure or intentional forgetting. “It’s about constructing a new kind of history—one that acknowledges the gaps and gives space to what was never written down.”
As one traverses the galleries, the work on view appears to be animated by a similar encyclopedic intent, with a compendium of diverse fragments and clues to a lost civilization. The neon is a poetic recollection of these moments and an invitation to question our sense of being in relation to the world—contemplating and embracing its inherent but fascinating complexity. “The neon pieces act as both markers and disruptions—illuminations that guide and provoke,” Strachan said. “They serve as clues, asking the viewer to engage with meaning as something fluid and constructed rather than fixed.”
The entirety of the show is, in some ways, like an encyclopedia—not one that is linear or exhaustive but one that embraces the poetic nature of history as a collection of fragmented, intersecting truths. A “Starless Midnight,” where, having lost their once-illusory stable points of reference, humans are forced to question the structure of reality and their place in the inherent chaos of existence. “At its core, the work is about questioning how we locate ourselves in time, in history and in the cosmos,” the artist concluded. “It’s an invitation to reimagine our own place within these larger systems of knowledge and forgetting.”
