Arcadia: Often Dreamt, Seldom Lived

The Arcadia: Often Dreamt, Seldom Lived exhibition will take place from Friday 23 May to Friday 20 June 2025 at the Verena Kerfin Gallery in Berlin. The gallery is proud to present a group exhibition featuring three emerging artists from Barbados: Alanis Forde, Anna Gibson and Akilah Watts. The exhibition will bring together three distinct painterly approaches that engage with themes of identity, memory and cultural self-understanding.


At the heart of their work lies an exploration of the body, belonging, and the friction between individual experience and collective history. The artists question how womanhood, home, and self-image are shaped in the Caribbean — navigating inherited colonial narratives, generational memory, and contemporary visibility.

Each artist employs her own visual language: from figurative painting to surreal compositions and collage-like textures. What unites them is a critical engagement with the idea of paradise — not as an external ideal, but as a layered, psychological, and cultural space.

Together, Forde, Gibson, and Watts offer a nuanced, empathetic, and powerful reflection on contemporary Afro-Caribbean life beyond exoticism and stereotype.