Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.
Interview by Paniz Vedavarz and Adi Berardini
Pamila Matharu is a multidisciplinary artist of Panjabi descent (maternal roots from pre-partition Lahore of former British India (now Pakistan), then Jalandhar (Panjab, India), and paternal roots from Bhano Langha, a village of Kapurthala district, Panjab, India, born in Birmingham, England, and arrived in Canada in 1976. They are based in Tkarónto/Toronto – Treaty 13 territory. Approaching contemporary art from the position of critical pedagogy and using an intersectional feminist lens through counter-archiving, their work culminates in a broad range of forms, including installation art, collage, social practice, and experimental media art.
Matharu speaks more about their art practice and their exhibition, Where Were You in ’92? at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, curated by Emelie Chhangur, Nasrin Himada, and Charlotte Gagnier, and their multi-media installation as part of the 2024 Toronto Biennial, tere naal _ with you, that pays tribute to the enduring influence of the artist Winsom Winsom. Pamila was introduced to Winsom through the Fresh Arts program, a Black artist-led initiative that opened doors for numerous artists. The installation was deliberately designed as a space for rest as defiance, nurturing, and replenishment. Reflecting on standing up against current and past injustices, Matharu uses the space to instill a sense of hope, asking participants to reflect on the question, “Who taught you to love?”
Paniz Vedavarz: Your zines and installations interweave your personal experiences with wider community stories. How do you navigate blending your own voice with the voices of others, particularly when dealing with sensitive or painful histories?
I’m coming at it from lived experience. My storytelling is being accessed through my own lived experience, my memories, visceral memories. What I’m trying to do is use history as a medium, and I started to realize that history wasn’t changing much around looking at police brutality on Black and Brown lives. What does it mean to witness it at 19 or 20 years old? What does it mean to witness it in my 40s and my 50s now? In some ways, I’m using the circle as a framework, but has the needle really stretched that far? In some cases, yes, I would say. But still, there’s a way to go.
Adi Berardini: For sure. Especially seeing everything right now in the news and politics, it feels like we’re going so backward.
Pamila Matharu: This is what I mean. It’s when people ask, “Why are you delving into the past?” Well, you can’t figure out the future without looking at the past.
AB: You address mentorship through your practice, such as your exhibition ‘Where Were You in ’92?’ at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, which looked at the Fresh Arts multi-disciplinary arts program in the 90s that created space for Black and Indigenous youth, and later racialized youth. You particularly reference your relationship with artist Winsom Winsom. Can you explain more about this pivotal mentorship and how you’ve used it as inspiration in your practice and as a mode to research and display the under-recorded impact of the program that impacted generation(s) of artists?
PM: Fresh Arts is a period that comes up in the Black Arts Movement. And when we talk about movement, when it comes to art history, it’s always Western methodologies and Western art history, yet the Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists are nowhere to be found. And we are always the sidebar or the thin chapter at the end, or perhaps the last couple of lectures in a Western art history survey course.
The project I was invited to at Agnes Etherington Art Centre was to “roll out the red carpet,” or metaphorically, finally give my flowers to Winsom. What I mean by that is to explain my relationship to her, and how I have spoken of Winsom informally in spaces and with curators and with artists, with institutional folks for the last 25 years; my relationship passed 30 years in 2024, when I met her in the summer of 1994.
In 2022, the project at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Where Were You in ’92?, was mostly research-based. I often use my platforms strategically to invite other underrepresented artists who I reckon could use exposure from the platform I’m initially asked to take up space on. In this case, I was asked by Emelie Chhangur, the [former] Executive Director & Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, to examine Winsom’s relationship to the city of Kingston, Ontario. At the time, before or while the request was happening, Winsom’s actual archive was being shipped from Belize to the AGO Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives. I had to access her archives at the AGO Library and Archives, which I had previously had a relationship with through an earlier project I did in 2019 at A Space Gallery, where I found some discarded material from their library and archives. I built an entire exhibition, and that’s where this moniker of counter-archiving came from, because I did not undertake an information sciences degree or anything of the like.
Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.
I’ve always had a strong interest in research from primary sources like books and literature. I’m not a practicing writer— I write for pleasure and my own studio practice, well, grant applications really! I definitely dabble in creative writing, but I don’t make it one of the things I share openly too much, and Emelie was aware of that. In terms of my lived experience and narrating this story and legacy, in a former project we did earlier than that, back in 2012 at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, in an intersectional feminist exhibit curated by Pamela Edmonds and Carla Garnet. Emelie had already, in some ways, planted the seeds of inviting me into Agnes and to do this project. Chhangur really is the constant gardener!
But in some ways, I was circumventing and ‘migrating the margin’, which was also a show that we did at the Art Gallery of York University [Now The Goldfarb Gallery of York University]. But I’m using the terminology of migrating the margins, where I was looking at Winsom’s archive at the AGO Library and Archives, which houses six boxes of fonds.[1] I think it might be growing for Winsom’s practice, in terms of her materiality, her research material that she’s archived. And I was asked to focus solely on Kingston, Ontario.
Winsom spent close to 30 years in Kingston, Ontario, and I believe that she helped establish Black Kingston, and what I mean by that is community-engaged, artistic programming, as well as organizational activities. Kingston has five jails, and there are a number of hospitals. It’s also formerly Upper Canada, and that was the “center” prior to Ottawa becoming our federal capital. In terms of the nation-state history, there are a lot of layers, and I was challenged to think through and grow a methodology from the archives and unofficial records.
I say it’s a methodology because my methodology is collage. I use it in the most abstract sense as well as the most very minute kind of paper collage: paper and cut and paste. But then I also collage in space, through sound, video. I created a handmade collage mural on the walls of Agnes, where I surveyed Winsom’s 30 years and all the material that was within that roughly 30-year span in Kingston. I selected over 100 fonds initially. And then the designer I worked with, Cecilia Berkovic, and I whittled it down to about 50, about half of what I gathered. It was things that were of interest not just to me, but I was thinking through the prospective audience who would come through, perhaps former student-artists, like the child artists that were in some of the photographs I selected. People did arrive and say, “Oh, this person taught me in this program here in Kingston.” Or a person would come in and say, “I did a cooking thing with Winsom, or I did this, or that with Winsom,” so all these wonderful stories started to unfurl in Kingston.
[Since] I was also looking at the story of Fresh Arts, what I decided to do was predate Fresh Arts and look at the origins of the Black Action Defense Committee, which was very instrumental during that time, and it predates Black Lives Matter Toronto. And the history of how one arrives here, with whatever historical incidents that happen in your DNA when you arrive on Turtle Island. Then there’s a whole other battery of ways in which you are an uninvited guest received on Turtle Island. Whether that is the government-funded institutions like the police or formal K-12 schools or the publicly funded medical system, we have seen how these institutions have repeatedly failed non-white bodies of cultures, as well as white bodies, right? “Bodies of culture” is a term that I have learned from the social worker and somatic practitioner Resmaa Menakem, who wrote My Grandmother’s Hands; it’s not a term I came up with. So, white bodies of culture versus racialized bodies of culture, Indigenous bodies of culture, and Black bodies of culture.
Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation detail. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.
I was thinking through this visibility lens in terms of Winsom not only coming from Kingston, Jamaica, to Kingston, Ontario, but also establishing and bringing her young family there with her partner at the time. And then how they utilized numerous forms of education, not just in the public education system, but also as community-engaged public educators. It was just wonderful to see how she used her gifts as a visual artist, as a gifted culinary artist, and as a food justice practitioner to really make relational gathering spaces where people would come together and share, whether it was her storytelling or listening to invitational guest artists’ stories. The images were not of that sharing, but there was ephemeral documentation that these things did happen in Kingston. Then the other wall was about the Black Action Defense Committee up to and towards the Yonge Street Uprising.
[Regarding] Fresh Arts, the Yonge Street Uprising, which occurred in the summer of 1992, May 1992.[2] It was an incident in which a plainclothes police officer shot at a young Black man who was assumed to be affiliated with drugs and drug trading. Assumed is the keyword here. This narrative doesn’t change, right? It happened in the week that the verdict came out in LA about the Rodney King trials. The L.A. uprising happened in the same week, so Toronto and L.A. were both burning, literally and figuratively. I wouldn’t say fires were happening in Toronto, but they were in L.A., and there was definitely social unrest in both cities. In Toronto, there was a loss of businesses, and the very institution of policing is about protecting property, right? So, there’s a whole argument there to be analyzed around, well, what’s important? Black lives or property?
I happened to be at the action. It was a peaceful demonstration for the day, until the Yonge Street uprising started later in the evening. But I was not at the uprising. I was at the protest. I used the protest as a key event, and then I looked at the before and after, on one wall, the Yonge Street uprising. The Black Action Defense Committee organized the protest for the death of Raymond Constantine Lawrence, and then a look at today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
History becomes an active agent in that telling. That could have taken place in the form of a zine, but to me, I felt like I was using the walls as my substrate and then doing this gigantic mural-like zine. Those two narratives, I cannot separate my story about Winsom Winsom without talking about being at this protest [about] police brutality on Black life. It was my first public protest; about to graduate from AY Jackson Secondary School that spring, and I was just about to turn 19 that Labour Day weekend. And two years later, before I turned 21, youth of racialized communities were invited to enter Fresh Arts, and then I joined.
AB: Thank you for sharing that generous history and trajectory.
PM: I would like to stress that there’s never been an exhibit about Fresh Arts, and even around the Black Arts Movement in Canada. There hasn’t been a significant effort to bring this history together in something that can be catalogued. But I don’t think I’m the only one here sharing these narratives. As I mentioned, I’m using lived experience to tell these stories—They’re not fiction in any way.
Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid.
PV: Your installations, specifically tere naal _ with you, seem to invite viewers into shared or communal spaces, such as the baithak (lounge) you incorporated into the exhibition. Could you talk about how you approach audience engagement when designing these immersive environments, and what role community-building plays in your overall practice?
PM: I think as a diasporic artist growing up in a South Asian household, or particularly in a Panjabi Sikh household, intergenerational sittings and gatherings are very indicative of our cultures. A lot of Pan-Asian cultures focus on tea gatherings, rituals, and ceremonies, and whatnot.
We don’t really have a tea ceremony per se, but we definitely have loads of tea time that happens, and you can have cups and cups of cha (tea) all day in Panjab, all over India, as well as in the diaspora. This is a very common thing to do, much like café culture. I reckon that café culture started in Europe, and it arrived in North America with the European settler culture. I was using the baithak space as a social sculpture, something that is more informal than western chairs and sofas. The sitting aspect is on the floor, with pillows and carpets to gather folks on and to have some much-needed respite and rest alone or in community.
What I have understood growing up watching my parents and all their peer groups is that BIPOC individuals don’t have the same playing field if we really examine labour markets and their operating systems. Who gets to rest, and who gets to just keep working, or has to? It’s not who gets to, as that implies a choice, but who has to keep working nonstop?
And often we hear this because the term self-care did not come from my culture, particularly. We have words for that, but no word says, “self-care.” That terminology came from movement elder Audre Lorde, African American thinker, writer, academic, and poet. I was raised in that time period for Fresh Arts. I am reflecting on the second-wave Black feminist cultural producers who raised me as an artist. There’s no other way for me to address my communal gatherings of joy, grief, and solace. They’re not necessarily in a tavern or a bar, as a lot of folks in the community are sober. It’ll be around non-alcoholic beverages, things that are specifically accustomed to our culture.
I didn’t necessarily serve during the installation; it was more of an action for holding space. And when we talk about holding space, it’s creating that gathering space. I’m implying, come and rest, or chill with your kids, or if you want to read a book, write, or draw, please come and do that. I was thinking through the space of the biennial: who gets to [rest]? It could be an active young family, or it could be elders.
I put two modern Adirondack chairs in there for folks who might have accessibility issues. I’m always thinking about who has access to these spaces physically, mentally, and intellectually as well. Access is not just about physicality. It’s also about all these kinds of capacities around human activity through one’s mind, body, and spirit.
The video was the one thing that I brought from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. It’s an 11-minute video that basically draws on my history on Turtle Island. Fred Moten, African American poet, thinker, writer, and academic, has a teaching strategy with his students where he asks his students when they arrive at their first meeting, “How did you get here?” So, I use the framework of asking myself, “How did I get here?” When I think back to my past selves, how did I get here from May of 1976 and, prior to my arrival, my overall community from the early 1900s?
I delved into not just my lived experience in that 11-minute video, but I tracked the history and inquired about the history of when my people arrived and what happened after that. I go back to looking at the early 1900s, and a lot of people don’t know that over 2 million Indians were in World Wars I and II. In some ways, I’m using it as a pedagogical tool, but I don’t want to hammer it over the head. If you want to look at it through a contemporary art lens, I kind of throw that out the window. I’m going to play with all these strategies— arts pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and contemporary art design.
I am a former co-founder of the Come Up to My Room exhibit in Toronto, which lasted about 17 or 18 years, so site specificity and immersive installations were very significant in informing this work. I would say that I’m trying to disrupt the gallery space using that installation strategy, perhaps with how one would consider “community engaged.”
Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid.
PV: I enjoyed that point about the privilege of who gets the right to rest.
PM: Exactly. Yeah, who gets that? It might be a [day off] for us today, but we’re working, right? It’s a Sunday. A Sunday implies a lot of different things, but we’re working right now. We’re both labouring, right? Who gets to have the privilege of a Saturday and Sunday off? I’m taking my first rest from doing two careers. I’ve been a practicing artist for 31 years, and I have been a high school teacher for 21 years. It’s the first time I’m taking a break to go to grad school. I’ve been doing both full-time. In fact, I was worried about all this time/space, but my graduate seminars and TA and sessional work filled it right back up!
We’re all students of life until our very last breath.
AB: It’s quite amazing that you’re also a high school teacher. Can you expand on the role and the relationship of being an educator and how that plays into your practice a bit further?
PM: I was worried in the beginning about how full-time teaching would impact my art career. But then I realized they were interchangeable once I entered the high school classroom. It was almost like I was the visiting artist every day, but teenagers don’t see you as that. They have an idea that this is a classic high school experience. When you ask folks, “Did you love school?” You’re going to get a mixed bag of answers. But if you ask folks, “Did you love learning?” Nobody’s going to say, “No.” Learning is a continuum. We’re all students of life until our very last breath.
Schooling, though, is a whole different playing field because it’s about conformity; it’s about the nation-state, and how we’re taught. You’re going to go from that starting point to find your calling, your passions, and your purpose. If you look at the inception of schooling in North America, it was really from the Industrial Revolution forward. It was about getting folks in line for the masses to help generate and continue to build society. And that is going to happen with the masses, not necessarily the elite few that basically rule us.
Once students and learners understand there’s a difference between schooling and learning, the synapses start going off. It’s like, “Yeah, I suck at this, but yeah, you’re right. I’m creative.” We have the natural ability to be creative. I think there’s a difference between looking at how education and my art practice are in some ways interchangeable and intertwinable. I look at my practice as a tapestry, rather than separating it into silos.
PV: As you develop Toronto Biennial of Art’s Zine Three, which focuses on futurities, what do you envision for the next generation of counter-archivists, activists, and artists committed to addressing underrepresentation in the arts?
PM: We’re centering Black feminist cultural producers of today in that third zine through the lens of futurities. It will be a gathering of the activities archived by the Toronto Biennial of Art. And Zine Three will focus on voices who were present during TBA24 and the resulting documentation of what happened. There was this wonderful project the storytellers made in my installation, and it was because Siki Soberetonari, one of the storytellers, said that she wanted to collect people’s responses to my question, “Who taught you to love?” What I suggested recently was that we gather all the responses and edit them because it’s about young people, zero to 100, who added their responses to the question I put up on the wall, “Who taught you to love?” Love, meaning the idea of love and teaching. We’re talking about arts pedagogy and myself as a teaching artist; I use my art life as a form of cultural resistance.
“Who taught you to love?” is not necessarily in the Ontario curriculum. I’m going outside of that, but it’s in my curriculum because I’m also reflecting on my relationship with Winsom Winsom. She taught me that teaching is love, which is a form of care. I’m also tuning into what I was doing and thinking with her at the time, and what she saw in me. Had she not seen me, I don’t think I’d be here today. She witnessed that I had something to offer the world and just encouraged me in a variety of ways over one summer, really.
I’m asking the public, “Who taught you to love?” and then that was recorded and taken up. The idea is that I want to build something where people can feel inspired by social change and how the arts are a fantastic tool for that, especially in a world that is so fraught right now. These are the conversations I want to hold space for. And again, thinking through that space, it was a container for all the programming that happened. I make these spaces so I can hold space for socially-engaged activations. The idea then becomes a little bit unsettling for the idea of a museum visit, a gallery visit, or a biennial visit.
Who has three hours right now? We are in an attention-deficit economy! No one has the time, or space, or bandwidth. So, when you intentionally create a space for care, when you intentionally create a zine for reflection, what can that then go on to produce for that individual or perhaps a group tomorrow or throughout the path they’re on? I’m just thinking through and around Futurities and the conversation around hope. The last conversation we had through my public programming was called Some Kind of Hope. So, it’s about hope. It will be about some kind of hope.
Check out this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art, Things Fall Apart, curated by Allison Glenn, from September 26 to December 20th, 2026.
[1] A fonds is a natural accumulation of records a person or organization makes or receives through their daily activities.
[2] For more context on the Yonge Street Uprising: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/activists-reflect-on-30-year-anniversary-yonge-street-uprising-1.6439452