The Collection

Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work spans installation, sculpture, video, photography, and printmaking. His practice examines how overlooked histories and enduring colonial legacies reverberate into the present, shaping cultural identity and environmental realities across the Caribbean and beyond. Often using the sea and coastal space as conceptual frameworks, Benjamin addresses themes of ancestral memory, the contradictions of tourism and paradise, and the ecological precarity of island life.

Working through research, oral histories, and critical fabulation, Benjamin creates poetic, open-ended installations and moving images that layer archival references with vernacular materials—such as cornmeal or fish traps—to collapse temporal boundaries and propose interconnected futures.

His work has been presented internationally at documenta 15, Kassel, Germany (2022); Kingston Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica (2022); Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival (2021); Ghetto Biennial, Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2018); and the Jamaica Biennial, Kingston, Jamaica (2017), among others. Benjamin earned his MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 2021, and is a 2023 Artadia Awardee and a 2023–24 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Awardee.