Tamika Galanis is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist. A Bahamian native, Tamika’s work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns. Emphasizing the importance of Bahamian cultural identity for cultural preservation, Tamika documents aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics.

Tamika’s photography-based-practice includes traditional documentary work and new media abstractions of written, oral, and archival histories. Hacking the Narrative is a multimedia project composed of photographs, film, and sculptural objects that shed light on the conditions in which Bahamians live outside of the mythical promise of paradise.
 

Tamika’s films have screened internationally at festivals including the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, The Bahamas International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Smithsonian’s African American Film Festival. Tamika has exhibited her artwork in The Bahamas, the United States and the United Kingdom. She was awarded the inaugural Post-MFA Fellowship in Documentary Arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and, she is a former Lovelace Fellow for the study of the Alan Lomax Collection at the United States Library of Congress where she worked to repatriate the Bahamian materials. Tamika is actively working with the archive as an independent artist.