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Thousands of Haiti’s poorest call it home: Grand Rue, a district of Port-au-Prince once run by merchants and bankers, now populated by people living in corrugated metal shells For several months after the earthquake in January 2010 that killed over 300,000 Haitians, the dead continued to line its streets Corpses queued for the cemeteries, their bodies stacked on top of each other, awaiting a turn for temporary interment before making way for another’s remains     The modernist envelope that is Nottingham Contemporary, the city’s landmark art centre, is as far from downtown Port-au-Prince as you’re  likely to get Yet its recent exhibition Kafou: Haiti, Art and Voudou, was a significant attempt to present to a new audience the attempts of an artistic community to find expression for the experience of communal trauma I want to contrast these works against more familiar examples of Western artists’ articulation of large-scale tragedy   The suffering that seems ubiquitous to Haitian life is inherent to its culture, embodied in Baron Samedi, a dandified embodiment of death and fertility who has smirked his way through Haitian voudou for centuries At the show in Nottingham — alongside Haitian art dating back to the 1940s — Grand Rue is partly represented as a series of sculptures by Atis Resiztans (AR), a contemporary artistic group from the district who employ found materials such as human skulls, tyres or wooden blocks to construct fearsome ritualistic statues of Haitian spirits Their humour is apparent in their incorporation of such things as the high-heeled shoes sent by US human rights charities, despite their being obviously inappropriate for Haiti’s roads After several minutes of watching a film about the group directed by the show’s co-curator, Leah Gordon, glued to your seat in horror, amusement and awe, you begin to adjust to AR’s attitude Its artists laugh at their effigies’ dicks, huge and bouncy and emblematic of the nation’s fertility and desire to rebuild AR smirk at journalists who could never understand their culture And they laugh at death   Consumers