Not All Has To Be As It Was
Not All Has To Be As It Was
Masterworks Museum Bermuda
September 27, 2024-February 22, 2025
Not All Has to Be As It Was
features multidisciplinary contemporary artist, creative director, designer and storyteller, Gherdai Hassell. Currently living and working in the UK, Hassell will return home for her first-ever exhibition at Masterworks.
NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS is Hassell’s first collaborative exhibition featuring, alongside her work, the Masterworks Permanent Collection and collaborations with fellow Bermudian artists Yesha Townsend and Essence Aikman.
Inspired by the landscapes found in the Masterworks Collection, NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS seeks to conceptually and materially reimagine the painted landscape. Presenting her ‘Alibii’ figures as ‘Land Lords,’ caretakers of the land and guardians of the ‘Onion Seed,’ inspired by Nellie Musson, atop a landscape of collaged archival images, historical land documents and maps, Hassell layers the fabric of the past with visions of a newly imagined present. A landscape anew, NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS offers an alternative Bermuda landscape, and imagines who the ‘Lords’ of our land could have been.
The core exhibition, featured in the Butterfield Gallery, will include bespoke works by Hassell, alongside selected works from the Collection. The Butterfield Gallery will also house Hassell’s collaboration with Essence Aikman, a short-film entitled Finding Soft Ground; directed by Aikman, and produced by Hassell. Holy Ground, the collaboration between Hassell and Yesha Townsend, will be featured in the Mezzanine Gallery, and includes a participatory installation to which the artists will invite the public to contribute.
Finding Soft Ground
Directed By Essence Aikman
Produced by Gherdai Hassell
Finding Soft Ground centres the past, reimagined as the present, investigating Bermuda’s truths hidden within landscapes. Our protagonist remains unnamed, unspoken, to draw connections with the varied identities of our envisioned female “Land Lords”. Her burgundy cape contrasts with the land’s green; soundscapes of water rush to encapsulate a space overflowing with stories never shared. The overgrown of the grass she traverses through, her garden and her land, embodies the history of Bermuda – it being unaddressed, ignored and unkept, causing the overgrowth. Finding Soft Ground aims to work with what is forgotten or never thought of. To imagine who the Lords of our Lands could have been.”
NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS, and its accompanying collaborations will open with a Members’ Preview from 5:30-7:30pm on Friday, September 27, just in time for Art Month.
NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS will be on view until February 22, 2025. The exhibition is curated by Masterworks’ Museum and Gallery Exhibitions Officer, Jasmine Lee. Support for this exhibition is graciously provided by an Anonymous donor.
