Art report: On Tavares Strachan’s Supernovas at Kunsthalle Mannheim

written by Katie Kung

Empowerment

Tavares Strachan rose to fame because of a block of ice.

In 2005, he journeyed to the Alaskan Arctic, extracted a two-and-a-half-ton piece of ice from a frozen river (with some help), and shipped it to the Bahamas, his birthplace. There, in the tropical summer heat, the ice was kept intact in a specially designed solar-powered freezer and exhibited under the title The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want. This early piece remains one of his most widely recognised works. It is a poetic, almost surreal juxtaposition—ice in the tropics, powered paradoxically by the sun—alluding partly to his own childhood inability to comprehend snow and ice, growing up on an island where such experiences were out of reach. This work also reflects on the interdependence of extremes: geographical and climatic, social and economic, racial and cultural.

As someone who grew up in the subtropics, I felt a resonance with this estrangement from ice. Snow was distant, incomprehensible, expensive. My later years in Germany introduced me to ‘real’ winters: the bite of sub-zero air, layers of scarves and socks, blanketed roofs so cold that powdery fresh snow does not stay. But even that reality quickly slipped away. By the late 2010s, winters grew shorter, snow scarce and summers more oppressive. Heat waves are the new seasonal rhythm. Solutions emerged, of course, when my old friends and classmates got new jobs that came with better salaries, coming with new air conditioners, better-insulated apartments and endless searches for better-looking fans or a good deal for a Dyson air cooler. Technology, when paired with money, always seems to offer empowerment and solutions. Just as the Bahamian sun preserved an Arctic block of ice, consumer power promises resilience against climate volatility.

This tension sits at the core of Anthropocene discourse. In the 2010s, the Anthropocene became the dominant frame for planetary change, yet critics noted how it flattens humanity into a singular agent, overlooking uneven distributions of energy, progress and suffering. Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’ sharpened the critique, naming capitalism—and its histories of colonialism, imperialism, and Cartesian dualism—the driver behind the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene describes, the Capitalocene explains. Yet Strachan’s work raises a further question: how do we reconcile capitalism’s sins when marginalised communities and postcolonial nations also participate in its systems of empowerment? What happens when the tools of oppression are also the means of aspiration?

Unending Struggle, Unending Protest

These contradictions—between care and fragility, power and its limits, exploration and exploitation—run throughout Strachan’s practice. His Supernovas exhibition at Kunsthalle Mannheim, his first in Germany, continues this exploration of extremes, particularly on outer space and environmental thresholds. It does so with a quiet insistence on protest,  memory and critique.

The exhibition opens with The Encyclopedia of Invisibility, an ongoing project that reimagines the Encyclopædia Britannica. In a transparent pavilion, fragments of text, illustrations, and photographs are suspended, unreadable yet insistently present. The work points back to Strachan’s childhood, where, from his grandparents’ copy of Encyclopædia Britannica, he could never find anything that reflected his life in the Bahamas, a former British colony.

Perhaps his encyclopedia is not meant to be legible; it is a utopia. It inserts overlooked histories and lives into the archive of human knowledge, resisting capture or erasure, but accepts past realities while aspiring to open up for new ones.

Strachan, in his own words, described his practice as an ‘unending protest against the status quo’, and The Encyclopedia of Invisibility embodies this claim. It is a protest not through slogans, but through form. Strachan’s work keeps alive the paradox of protest itself: always incomplete, ongoing and struggling to be heard.

Decolonisation through Liberation

Strachan’s background—growing up in the Bahamas, a nation shaped by colonial histories—permeates his engagement with exploration, science, and space travel. In Supernovas, he pays homage to African-American figures such as Matthew Henson, the polar explorer and Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut chosen for a national space program, who died tragically during a test flight with a student pilot. Their names remain little known, though indispensable to their own space, an absence Strachan seeks to redress. This gesture resonates with his broader project: to recover and celebrate marginalised figures who remain invisible within grand narratives of progress and exploration.

Strachan does not limit himself to symbolic gestures. He has undergone astronaut training himself, collaborated with Russian scientists to study deep-sea pressure and led Arctic expeditions. By pushing his own physical and psychological limits—subjecting himself to extremes of pressure, isolation, and endurance—he mirrors the planetary boundaries he explores in his art. His Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center (BASEC)—both an art studio and research hub—launched a glass rocket fueled by local cane sugar, a material resonant with the colonial economies of the Caribbean. Here, liberation is an imagination as much as participation, an audacious claim to the same repertoire of exploration once monopolised by empires.

Yet, this too is ambivalent. While critiquing colonial legacies, his works intuitively acknowledge desires, his own nonetheless, to enter the domains of power and exploration/exploitation, the subject of decolonial critique, through space programs and extreme expeditions. His honesty lies in showing that decolonisation is not a clean break but a messy negotiation: liberation enacted within the very structures one seeks to undo.

By commemorating forgotten Black explorers while also aspiring towards exploration himself, Strachan highlights both the persistence of marginalisation and the ongoing struggle to claim presence in spaces once denied. In Supernovas, these tensions crystallise. Empowerment is inseparable from complicity; protest is unending; liberation requires both critique and participation. Strachan’s futuristic and optimistic attitude constantly struggles against the pulling currents of the past, marching toward an indeterminate future where dreams may be realised only one small step—on earth—at a time.