| The making of an exhibition programme is both a private and public enterprise. It exemplifies by choice and site as much about the artists concerns and skills as well as the curators ambition and motivation. To deal with such a plethora of material, positionalities and substantial ideas, which are in due course to be introduced into the public domain can be daunting in its planning stage- for all unforeseen reasons from the technical failure of the method of delivery to its contextual flaws. But it is within this exciting frisson that contact will be established that assists in displacing doubts, subsequently allows amplifications beyond that which had been envisaged, planned or executed as "the exhibition". In making exhibitions; curators, artists and organisations take a chance with the public- even with great planning the whole event remains unrehearsed and feels overwhelmingly experimental on various levels. It is in these embryonic conditions of "making" and "exhibiting" that establishes a forum within which both curators and artists find their space to enable a form of translation, explaination and make available their research, their work. Within the framework of the Black Atlantic interdisciplinary project all of these conditions of exhibition making became intertwined with burdened histories, intermingled positions about modernity and portable identities. Here, the curatorial position and the process of exploring the conceptual and critical terrain became itself a transcultural space. Here transatlantic diversity, forced movements of peoples and the longeviety of the pursuit of moral rectitude made the project seem highly urgent. This sensation to promote its moral background especially within middle Europe has also substantially moulded its format, allowed and exposed an understanding beyond the logic of inside and outside. The outcome has been a series of decisions that allow for a more vital contemplation on the contemporary global environment. This vision of the global has been resolutely formulated by corollation with the local history and placing the local central to the discourse . Central to the works is the issue of contact. The artworks are committed to fostering a growing uncovering of the abundance of historic contact between divergent spaces, communities, and even continents. No place remains innocent or aloof from the networked global condition. The notion of contact helps us to deepen our collective understanding and rethink residues of historical facts including slavery, colonialism and the empirical quest for domination of peoples and resources. The exhibition exemplifies by digging for evidence and re-siting these unearthed remains to throw new light on the contemporary European Transatlantic relations. What we know, why we know it and how we know it. Are the primary tools of excavation to construct a counter geography. Even the idea of belonging or national citizenship- these accepted norms and their ontologies are questioned- to demand a radical disjunction in the quest to re-imagine/ represent a different geopolitical arrangement. The Black Atlantic register, its framing helps us to reconfigure the given that has existed as different and difference. The works in the exhibition creatively helps to modify the way we look at the world - a way of visual comprehension and settle difference into a diasporic formation - which in itself specifies an important cultural formation. One of the most important paradigms of human consciousness is "resistance" - to make us who we are, who we want to be and gives back a sense of humanity - realising a sense of power - these ideas/ notions feature in some of the artists work. Not necessarily as a romance of resistance, or of bravery but as a model of exchange around the experience of survival - in their visual vocabulary these artists articulate resistance as movements, or as moments and even constellations where a fact remembered is not only a fact imagined but the very act of re-invention.
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