PREVIEW: 02 October 2026, 5PM (Quiet Time), 6–9PM
EXHIBITION: 03 October – 28 November 2026
OPENING TIMES: Thursday–Saturday, 10AM–5PM, or by appointment.
Join us for the opening of Santiago Mostyn’s new exhibition, Natural History.
Natural History is the culmination of an extended period of visual and auditory research by Stockholm-based artist Santiago Mostyn into the Grenada Revolution (1979-1983). Photographic archives, personal correspondence, audio recordings, textiles and 16mm film are presented and remixed in the galleries to create an open-ended retelling of one of the most consequential yet overlooked episodes of the Black Power era in the Caribbean.
Central to the exhibition is a 16mm film portrait of Bernard Coard, co-leader of Revolutionary Grenada, who is often held responsible in colloquial discourse for the split that resulted in Bishop’s death. After twenty-six years in prison, Coard now lives alone in Jamaica, where he is filmed moving through his daily routines of writing, swimming, and reading, before falling asleep and waking, in an altered state, in the middle of the jungle.
Coard is a figure of profound historical ambivalence: the intellectual architect of the Revolution, a childhood friend of Maurice Bishop, and since his release a writer, lecturer, and consultant on projects including Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series. Reflecting on the work, Mostyn explains that the film’s key axis is “human folly and how it collapses back into, or is eventually forgotten by, nature.”
Natural History constitutes a reckoning with personal history, with the knowledge carried in craft, and with the kinds of memory that resist being metabolised into official narrative.
This exhibition was developed in close collaboration with curator Jade Foster.
On October 24th, Mostyn will collaborate with Dr Jacob Fairless Nicholson and the Black Cultural Archives on a display and activation of archival material from the Jackie Creft Memorial Collection in Primary’s Reading Room.
Access: Natural History takes place across two gallery spaces at Primary, with level access to Gallery 1 and the reading room. There is stepped access to Gallery 2. You can find further access information on our website’s Visit Us page and via AccessAble.
Please email admin@weareprimary.org with any access inquiries.