Alvaro Barrington at the Tate Britain 'You survive with grace'

By Amah-Rose Abrams

Alvaro Barrington’s Grace, installed in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, is a meditation of Black culture and identity communicated through his own experiences and memories growing up in ex-British colony Grenada and New York City.

Barrington has spoken in the past about his north stars and this exhibition, which dominates the enormous space it inhabits, is built around three figures from his life. His grandmother Frederica, his close-friend or sister Samantha and his mother Emelda. Grace is also inspired by the hymn Amazing Grace, a piece of music that sits at the heart of Western Black culture.

In reference to resistance to structural racism, ideas around Black women’s role in society and states of grace and the Church as a haven Amazing Grace symbolises many things in the work and will do so for the public.

Citing Aretha Franklin’s performance at Obama’s inauguration in which she emerges frail from a recent surgery to bloom into a phenomenal performance, Barrington explained what grace and Amazing Grace embody for him: “Grace has always been a kind of particular emotional drive for Black people,” says Barrington as we speak under the galleries at Tate. “Like, how do you survive slavery gracefully? How do you survive mass incarceration, gracefully? How do you survive a country that brings you over to rebuild it, but then tries to deport you? You know what I mean? Usually it is with grace.”

On entering the Duveen Galleries, the ceiling is lowered, corrugated iron hangs over a series of sofas covered in plastic filled with sketches and abstract works in concrete with braided decorations in leather and fabric. The plastic speaks to the special living room in many Caribbean and diaspora homes in which everything is covered and rarely used, and the braids speak to a childhood memory of watching his sister have her hair braided. As you meander and sit in this space the sound of falling rain becomes apparent and it evokes a sense of cosiness and safety.

“I have this memory of growing up in Grenada and it's the rainy season, hurricane season, and all my cousins and I were staying with my grandma. We'd run into the house and the rain would be hitting the roof and I realised the rain was basically providing one of the reasons I hold so close to that memory, because the rain was providing a soundtrack; it was dramatising.”