In Conversation with Laveen Gammie

Architectures of power, green-screen-green, and the politics of In/visibility

Laveen Gammie, Interface (Installation view). Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski.

By Dani Neira

Last autumn, I began stealing loose breeze blocks, the cement building bricks with decorative designs carved out. You can find them stacked precariously outside of houses, creating partitions between the sidewalk and a parking lot, or perhaps as a stand-alone wall. There is a common design that resembles the geometric right angles of a camera’s viewfinder or increasingly ornamental and asymmetrical compositions. I am drawn to how the blocks shape my vision, how their negative spaces carve out slices of blue sky, and how I can catch someone’s eye through their moss-lined craters. 

Around this time, I listened to a podcast episode where Legacy Russell talks about the digital as an architecture, a space where massive corporations aim to control our “viewfinders.” Like the breeze block, algorithms frame what we see, simultaneously revealing and redacting information. Yet, both physical and digital structures can be torn down or defied. Perhaps my wayward collecting of breezeblocks was enacting some small form of rebellion. The mutability of these architectures offers possibilities and ways of slipping through systems that rely on legibility, classification, and censorship. We can understand censorship in this larger context as the suppression of information that is considered a threat to the hegemonic order. This censorship is sometimes literal, such as Canadians not being able to access news on social media platforms or the shadowbanning of pro-Palestinian voices. It is also insidiously embedded as racial and gender biases within technologies purported as neutral. 

While I was pondering breeze blocks, artist Laveen Gammie was looking at green-screen-green, and we were both reading Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell. I first came across Laveen’s installation-based exploration of “green-screen-green” in The Meet Up earlier this year. I’ll note here that Laveen and I are good friends, having met through a virtual studio visit back in 2020. Laveen’s practice is critical, playful, and deliciously material, and I return to it often. Her inquiry into green screens appears in Interface as an immersive space through painting the walls and floor, while in The Meet Up, it takes form in the painted platforms that host ladders and balloons. Both bodies of work interrogate how worldviews are projected upon the green screen and within the process of chroma-keying; the post-production technique of removing a green or blue background and replacing it with a different image.

DN: Many of your recent works, including your installation Interface at Open Space and exhibition The Meet Up at Fortune Gallery, have incorporated “green-screen-green. What drew you to explore green-screen-green, particularly in these physical, material ways?

LG: I was thinking about the invisibility of world-making. In my current work, I’m continuing to look at the idea of reification, or how we impose socially-created meaning on objects. As I was considering how worlds were built, a lot of that came down to film, the images, and the technology we consume. That’s how I came to the green screen, but going deeper, I wanted to ask,  why or how are we chroma-keying? This interest is built on it being something we use because it’s “unlike us,” it’s Other, and we use that colour to then project our own worlds. In that way, the green screen as Other is the sort of labour that never gets recognized. I became interested in the physicality of green-screen-green as a physical object. I wanted to give it recognition for its ability to create worlds and be projected onto. And I just love the colour. I love chroma key green. 

DN: When I first saw your green screen platforms, I was immediately drawn to the colour. Then it got me thinking about the physical object that is the green screen and how we don’t usually see it in a pre-production state.

LG: Exactly. We had to assign each other readings for class, and my classmate picked this reading that was a complete game changer. It’s called “Speech, Writing, Code, Three Worldviews,” by Katherine Hayles. It talks about the use of language as a form of power and how, in the past, restricting who has access to knowing how to utilize language has been a form of power dynamics (withholding power, obtaining power, and perpetuating power). Code has become a form of language that perpetuates power. Who has access to understand that language? Code is an approximation of so many things in our everyday life, meaning you can’t encapsulate everything. And I was like, holy shit, green-screen-greening is also an approximation of a worldview, and the power is held in the person that can project their fantasy or their ideas into the world they’re building. 

DN:  I feel like that also really ties into the idea of censorship or the suppression of information as a power dynamic. Going back to the invisibility of the green screen, I feel like it’s often forgotten that there are humans behind code and algorithms and that there’s no neutrality to technological tools.

LG: I feel like that, too, becomes a redaction. What has been left out of this seemingly finalized world that we are seeing?

DN: Yeah. I was thinking a lot about Legacy Russell’s text Glitch Feminism, where she states that the separation between the digital and the “real world” no longer exists. It made me consider how your work makes the green screen visible, what it means to make the production stage visible, and how that could be considered an “error.” How are you thinking about the conditions of in/visibility in your practice?

LG: The aspect of making the seemingly invisible, made visible, is something I’m still considering. I think green-screen-green is representative of a collaborative process. You need people, you need labour to build worlds, you need this green-screen-green backdrop, you need this sense of Other to create worlds. So bringing that into the context of the gallery and showcasing this form of world-making in its production stages, for me at least, showcases an aspect of labour, what it took to make the context for the objects that then sit on these platforms. Another thing that came up this week for me is what constitutes labour and making. Helen Molesworth brought this up in their recent talk, and it’s been lingering for me.

Laveen Gammie, Social Ladder, wood, green-screen-green paint, acrylic paint, disco ball, 2023. Courtesy of artist.

DN: Your exhibition, The Meet Up, is all about labour and who might have a place in the white-collar meeting or at the top of a corporate ladder…I’m reminded of Legacy’s thoughts on digital architectures. We have these big corporations like Instagram or TikTok which, through their algorithms, are attempting to be invisible in many ways while directly shaping our worldviews and what we consume. I’m also thinking about the relationship of that stage [The Meet Up] to the objects that you placed on top of them and the materials used, the painted ladders, yarn, balloons, and the associations these objects have.

LG: It brings me back to the text “Speech, Writing, Code,” because they approximate everything, they control everything. We just don’t see it. And what we do see is only the tip of the iceberg. In Canada, we can’t see the news, we know that. But there are so many things that are being coded, deleted, hidden, and controlled. The stages and performance bring me back to Legacy’s work, with this idea of gender performance and prescribed roles. Her book has been a game changer for me because I think about the prescribed role of everything. 

The Meet Up is about placing something as simple as a ladder in conversation with green-screen-green. The ladder has truck nuts at the top, and the title is Corporate Ladder. I’d like to think that it challenges the performance of climbing a corporate ladder. I’m commenting on it being a male-dominated industry, but the actual act of climbing a ladder we can all understand. Ladder climbing, in conversation with the idea of labour, brings up questions of who is at the top of the ladder. Who’s climbing or striving to climb the ladder?  What does that performance look like? What does it mean to be at the top? What does it mean to be at the bottom? And balloons as objects are interesting because they’re fleeting, they’re always dying, changing, floating…they’re never going to be the same. I think using balloons became a humorous way of commenting on darker things. Also bringing in the concept of necropolitics by Achille Mbembe, I’m thinking about who has the power to prescribe roles and to stage context. Balloons have a life and death, like us. So it’s also about who has the power to be/hold life or hold people in a place of death. I was thinking, how do I deal with social contexts and labour, while also dealing with this aspect of death and control?

Laveen Gammie, The Meeting, wood, metal, monks cloth, balloons, latex, plastic, yarn, 2023. 
Courtesy of artist.

DN: I love how your work utilizes everyday objects people can connect to. I’m sure everyone has memories and feelings attached to balloons whether through celebrations or get-well balloons. One of my favourite parts of that work was witnessing the balloons at any given time; some had deflated to the floor, while others were still fully inflated or hanging mid-way. In relation to my own body, some of them moved when I did, and others didn’t at all. 

LG: Yeah… there’s an immediacy to them. I move, they move. I come back, they’re not the same. I’m not the same. What does that mean? I very much could have kept pumping them up. But no, you have one life, and you will live out your life in the exhibition space. The balloons being disco balls were also a direct commentary on who gets to enjoy leisure and who has the waged labour of upkeeping leisure for others. 

Laveen Gammie, Interface (Installation view). Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski.

DN: I also wanted to talk about technological biases because that’s very tied to the technique of chroma-keying, which has historically used whiteness as a universal template. There are so many biases embedded in tools like AI, facial recognition, or cameras that are designed to properly expose white skin tones. Chroma-keying has this history where green and blue were decided to be the most “different” from white skin tones specifically. It’s interesting to see how artists are appropriating its language to question the cultural values imposed in their creation. When I started looking into chroma-keying, I re-watched Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational . MOV File, where she proposes blending into these green screens as a way of countering hyper-visibility…Who were you looking at when you were researching green screens? 

LG: I think I was taking a film course at the time. We had just watched Get Out by Jordan Peele, and I was looking at the way they used film to comment on the racist tropes that have existed in film and technology. I then came to green-screen-green because a student at UVic, Rebecca Fux, had made this hyper-realistic painting of their friends where the background is all green screen. It has this glitch moment where not all moments of the painting are complete. I was also exposed to Sondra Perry’s work, Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Work-station: Number One; their family is doing something completely nuclear family, just having dinner, but they’re all wearing [green] balaclavas. So, I was thinking about this prescription of violence that’s imposed on the Other, and it was a rabbit hole from there considering the connotations of green-screen-green and technology as a whole. What are the biases already embedded into the code itself, and who is the power holder in this language? 

DN: OK, to wrap this up… what are you working on or looking into right now?

LG: I’m thinking about unquestioned ritual and museums’ roles in slicing through and reducing ideas of ritual through an aestheticization of objects. That’s where I’m at right now. And…Bling Era. [Both laugh] Preciousness, adornment, what gets dismissed.

You can find more of Laveen Gammie’s work on her website.

This feature can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

Farewell Likely General: An Interview with Brooke Manning

Brooke Manning hanging the GenderFail shirt in the announcement post on social media. Photo by Tanja Tiziana, originally for Now Magazine.

By Ashley Culver

On August 13, 2023, Brooke Manning posted to Likely General’s Instagram account a closing announcement. It included a photo of her hanging a GenderFail t-shirt with the text ‘Radical Softness as a Boundless Form of Resistance’ in the storefront window along with five slides of a letter Manning penned sharing her decision rationale, gratitude, reminiscing about the beginning, and outlining her vision for the final two months. “Nothing lasts forever,” she writes, “and that’s what makes everything we touch in life so very remarkable.”

For a decade, Manning tended to Likely General, the independent “artist-focused shop and gallery primarily supporting the expressions of 300+ queer and marginalized artists.” She opened the small business, located at 389 Roncesvalles Avenue in Toronto, in 2013. Later, she began programming a gallery space in the back of the rectangular shop. Likely General grew into a hub of activity with workshops, events, book launches, lectures, and gallery openings unique to the space and the people it attracted, such as poly-potlucks, annual kids art show, iridology, and tarot readings. In a move counter to the capitalist nature of running a business, Likely General donated to numerous local non-profits and activist groups, proving Manning was guided by her own goals and dreams, eager to root into the community.

I met Manning along with her dog, Jane, who often joined her in Likely General, months after she had emptied the shop space. We sat at a picnic table in Trinity Bellwoods Park and chatted as Jane eyed the squirrels. We spent the afternoon talking, until the sun was too low, about growing into ourselves, the grief of closing, running a business with chronic illness, and embedding rituals into life.

Brooke Manning. Headshot by Andrew Blake McGill. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: It’s been awhile since Likely General closed. How are things with you these days?

BM: There’s a bit of dissonance for me, [Likely General] ended, and now, me as a person, I’m moving on to the next thing, and yet, there is the grief. I still receive messages that people miss it. I’m feeling that in waves too. But I’m also feeling the lessening of having to be that space.

AC: What does it mean to receive those messages?

BM: I’m touched. Before there was a little bit of a veil so I couldn’t sink too much into it. I didn’t want the ego of it. But I see that it’s not about me at all. You make something and it becomes bigger than you.

Before I would cry and wonder ‘I am letting you down?’ Now I can hold those things. I see that they see I need to do what I need to do. And also, these are gifts from them to say, ‘Thank you for doing that, you provided this for me,’ which is lovely.

AC: On the website, Likely General is described as “an independent community-minded small business.” What does community mean to you?

BM: I grew up in a small town. I feel like small towns are communities in the way that I went to kindergarten with the people that I went to high school with. It was ingrained in the fabric of my being. Coming here [to Toronto] I see community can be as big as the world. It’s the quality of vibrancy, of connection, and wanting to do something effective not just for yourself but for all that surrounds yourself. There’s a danger in the definition of community, also, because it creates separateness.

Likely General departure show. Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: How did you bring the queer community into Likely General?

BM: I’ve always been queer. I’ve always known that about myself since I was a little kid. I wasn’t open in the world about it until maybe my early- to mid-twenties. And I’m 39 now. When I opened the shop, in 2013, I had been living with my girlfriend at the time. We got [our dog] Jane together, and we still share her back and forth; it’s a beautiful extended Jane family — she’s 10 now. But even our relationship was so closeted. We had separate rooms, which was important to us for our autonomy, but many people didn’t know we were together.

I was looking at myself and realizing what that meant to me as a queer pansexual femme—being with many other queer people behind doors and then being with cishet men out in the world. And having people make assumptions about heterosexuality or all these things that aren’t on the surface. There was part of me that wanted to claim that for myself in an open space. I came to this conclusion in 2014 or 2015 and I kept thinking I have this space; I want to use it. I want to highlight people in a way that feels important to me. It wasn’t altruistic; I knew it would give me something, too. So, I opened the gallery section of the store to honor artists who are queer, or marginalized, or women. And then I very quickly [realized] the whole store has to be like this.

It’s remarkable and helped me come out in this way. I want to be seen for exactly who I am. There’s a seed inside all of us that desires that so badly—we all want to be watered.

Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: The experience of coming out is a universal one for so many of us who are queer. Would you share your story?

BM: It surprised people. I came out to my mom at the same time as opening Likely General. I remember we were in Zellers and my mom said “You keep talking about this person all the time. But you don’t say their name… Is it a woman? It’s okay if it is.” It was powerful. She very openly accepted me. In that moment, it was scary, but once it happened, it felt like no big deal, which taught me that I could do this in other ways, in bigger ways. And maybe it might be a big deal. Now I’m in this space where I don’t care what people think about me, which is very cool. It allows you to keep going and keep doing all of these things that you want to do. Like I would change the store all the time, just on a whim.

I realized the quality of asking for help and being honest, not just with myself, but with the community and others.

AC: What surprised you in the 10 years you ran Likely General?

BM: This is personal and it’s very simple: I surprised myself and the people who know me best when I came out of my shell. When the store opened, I was coming out of one of the most depressive episodes of my life. I couldn’t see myself. I was 28, and if you believe in this stuff, you’re entering your Saturn Return, it’s a tumultuous time. And holy crap, mine was tumultuous. Then 10 years later, I look at how I’ve been able to blossom, but also believe in myself, and create a self-belief that wasn’t there before. And with that, help other people find their own and shine on them a little bit, in a way that people shone on me so that I could get there. I didn’t expect that would come from opening a store.

AC: How did your chronic illness shape running the shop?

BM: I realized that I can’t do things alone. And I was the kind of person that has since I was born, done things alone. I’m an only child to a single mother. I realized the quality of asking for help and being honest, not just with myself, but with the community and others.

Something shifted, the pandemic started a conversation about people who are immunocompromised or have an autoimmune disease, [I thought] I’m going to be honest. When I can’t show up for work, I’m not just going to pretend that I’m fine when I’m in so much pain. Instead, I’m going to say, ‘I’m closing today.’

I started to hire employees, which helped greatly. I realized that I couldn’t let people into the parts of me that I kept hidden. But the staff texts, the way that we communicated with each other [ended that]. It was beautiful, like a team. Someone would say, ‘I got my period today and I don’t want to be in public, can anyone work?’ And sometimes nobody could, and I said well, we’re just going to close today. Sometimes I couldn’t walk down the stairs and [I thought] ‘If I can’t walk down the stairs, I can’t be in public.’

It’s the people that hold us, it isn’t the money.

Emblem for Likely General by Alicia Nauta. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: You describe a ritual in which you painted boobs when repainting the gallery space in an Instagram post. Can you tell me more about this?

BM: In the early days, I was constantly wearing all-black and nice shoes. I never changed out of my clothes to paint the gallery white — it was funny to me, the dance of it, the fragility. I wasn’t necessarily careful.

I kept thinking about how many layers of paint were on the wall before I got here. I wanted to write something funny [on the wall] and then I thought I’m going to paint a set of boobs every time. Different every time. Because they are all different every time. I would paint these big things, and then laugh to myself, and then paint over them. I did this 100 times before I told a person. Later, I revealed [this ritual on Instagram] and it made people smile. They would come into the gallery and tell their friends, ‘There are 200 pairs of boobs [under the paint].’

AC: Were there other rituals?

BM: I’m pagan and [that informs] my culture and who I want to be in the world and how I want to honour my life. So, I do things, such as candle work and nature stuff, daily. It was really important to ingrain aspects of that into the store to mark time. Time is important to me because I see it as non-linear.

Another ritual I had was around closing the store at the end of the day. I love metal music and Doom. I find it so happy. I grew up with metal and the metal heads that I hung out with in high school were some of the softest people I’ve ever met. So I would blast metal music after I close the store and do my close-out procedures.

Also, I charged a rod of selenite with a particular person and put it above the door so that when people entered the space, they passed under it—whether it’s a placebo or not, that’s magic, and people would walk into the store and be like, ‘I feel different.’

AC: Now that it’s closed, what legacy do you want for Likely General?

BM: That’s a good question. It’s the question I ask people that I work with at the end of life [as a death doula]. I want people to feel like it gave them something that they didn’t have otherwise, couldn’t see otherwise, or couldn’t find in themselves otherwise, but it was always there. It, you know, shone, something on it. I hope it allows people to see that they can do the thing, too. They can open a store that’s a bit against the grain. It doesn’t have to be about making a million dollars, it can be about making a life for yourself that’s joyful, peaceful, and calm.

Despite the Odds: Ordinary Grief by Parisa Azadi

Iranian men stand along a canal running through a farmland in the district of Haji Abad on the outskirts of Borujerd, Iran on February 7, 2018.

By Adi Berardini

Parisa Azadi is an Iranian-Canadian visual storyteller and photojournalist based between Dubai, UAE, and Tehran, Iran. Her series Ordinary Grief stems from a journey that involved Azadi returning to Iran after 25 years of “self-exile and embarking on a personal and political reclamation of her identity and history.” With images spanning 2017-2022, Ordinary Grief aims to, as Azadi describes, “reconcile despair and joy, exhaustion and hope. It’s about ordinary Iranians actively trying to create new futures for themselves despite the odds.” The images explore what it means to attempt to remember after experiencing cultural amnesia, longing, and belonging. The series is a love letter to Iran, the place she was born in, but has felt estranged from. Although Iran and Palestine are two distinctly different places with different histories, the narratives of displacement, war, and grief can be felt in parallel. The following article discusses the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza alongside Azadi’s series Ordinary Grief.

Parisa Azadi. Installation of the current group show at Eyes on Main Street festival in Wilson, NC on display until September 8, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Recently, I have been corresponding on video chat with Ahmed, a humanitarian aid organizer, in Gaza, Palestine. He’s in the dark (it’s 1 am with the time difference) and attempts to use his phone camera flashlight to illuminate. He shows me where he’s staying—a dark tent with a few buckets and a generator. Although we talk through WhatsApp with the help of translation, we don’t speak much verbally because of the language difference. But we share a mutual understanding in this moment through the silence. His house has been left in ruins due to the bombing; his friends and family members have been killed. He has been repeatedly displaced. When he explains the terror that he has faced I start to feel numb, like being submerged in an ice bath. The image is stamped in my mind, and although witnessing is heavy, it feels crucial. My heart breaks for him and his family.

Among the grief, life steadily keeps going, however much we might want to pause the world like the bad horror movie it can be.

The next day, he tells me that even though there’s genocidal aggression by Israeli forces, the kids are playing football (soccer for the Canadians) in the street. He flips to video chat and shows me the kids playing joyfully in the sandy terrain. A few days later, I see kids playing soccer in their front yard and the sidewalk as I go on my neighborhood walk. I think about the kids in Palestine and their resilience of spirit despite the immense trauma and losses they’ve experienced.

These circumstances demonstrate that even among great strife, life does not stop. Among the grief, life steadily keeps going, however much we might want to pause the world like the bad horror movie it can be. Although we can continue to urge for an immediate ceasefire, we cannot briefly pause life and resume. And in times of struggle, the feelings of anxiety and grief can be overwhelming. But with every story of oppression, there’s a counternarrative of resilience and resistance.

In Parisa Azadi’s ‘Ordinary Grief,’ the title a reference to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s A Journal of Ordinary Grief, Azadi returns to Iran after 25 years of what she describes as ‘self-imposed’ exile. Azadi was born in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and spent her formative years before she immigrated to Canada when she was eight. As she describes, “Throughout my travels and journey as a photographer, I realized that I was living in this emotional displacement, and I didn’t have a good sense of who I was and where I belonged.  I felt like I needed to go back and to confront that sense of displacement that I felt about my identity and try to come to terms with Iran as my home, as a place where I can exist.”

Nesa and her friend Yasaman look out the window in Tehran amid the coronavirus pandemic in Tehran, Iran on June 9, 2020. Like many young Iranians, they are worried about their future. Currency collapse, unemployment, and inflation make it harder for young Iranians to make ends meet, with many of them seeking a better life abroad.

I was first drawn to Azadi’s photographs for how they spotlight tender moments despite the layers of grief felt in Iran. In one photograph, two women, Nesa and her friend Yasaman, gaze out the window longingly, one lying down, and the other standing, illuminated by the outside lighting. The photo was taken during COVID-19, in a time of economic uncertainty and financial difficulty. Although the women both stare out into the void, the intimacy between them in the photograph is tangible. As Azadi explains, “In Iran, there was always this feeling of grief that was floating in the background, and you can tell by people’s body language and way they would stare off into space or out the window. And this has a lot to do with the fact that they feel like they lack a sense of agency of their own destiny.” Azadi is interested in the sense of disassociation that this provokes, exploring what it’s like to live experiencing isolation and the feeling of imprisonment.

This is a portrait of two sisters on the beach of Bandar Abbas, a port city in the south of Iran. It’s a tender and honest moment. I was struck by their innocence, by what they were wearing, and how free they felt. The portrait reminds me of how much Iran has changed since my childhood. In those days, rules were non-negotiable. I remember being shamed by a stranger for wearing a short dress at the age of six on the streets of Tehran. The growing religious conservatism and culture of fear and resentment taught people to constantly police each other. Iran has changed gradually over the years, but some of those changes have been enormous and the wall that divided us before is gradually crumbling. I’m finding more moments of lightness, moments where life feels a bit more relaxed, normal, and unencumbered.

However, as Azadi emphasizes, she hopes to show Iranians living their normal lives. “I think despite all the tragedies, I didn’t want to paint Iran as this dark and bleak place. Despite the darkness and I [see] constantly in my travels, I would see these moments of joy, lightness, and desire for social change.” And throughout the series, Iran has been experiencing a pivotal societal change in the last seven years.

A photograph features two young sisters on the beach at dusk in their bright Hello Kitty swimsuits, the youngest looking tentative and holding onto her sister’s arm. Azadi explains how she couldn’t go to the beach and play as freely in a bathing suit in the same way as these sisters, even as a child. As she recalls, “Back then, we learned to seek freedom in private. It was a way for us to just protect ourselves from outside dangers and oppressive rules. However, as she further states, “Iran is gradually changing. I am witnessing many Iranians pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally acceptable, actively trying to create a new future for themselves, despite the odds, despite the dangers.”

Children play in the river along Chalus Road on a hot summer day in Mazandaran Province, Iran on July 24, 2018.

Another thread in Ordinary Grief is relationships with animals and connection to the natural landscape. Children hang over the water on a branch in a turquoise inlet with their backs towards the camera on a hot summer day in Mazandaran Province; tourists are pictured in front of a vast natural background, taking photographs, and looking over the terrain. A Kurdish man, Reza, is pictured tending to his horse and gazing thoughtfully but solemnly against a dark lavender sky. The photograph was taken after teaching horse riding lessons in Ilam, Iran.

Reza Alaeinezhad embraces his horse after teaching horse riding lessons in the city of Ilam, Iran on October 28, 2018.

A man named Akbar is pictured on top of a mountain with a walking stick. He takes a break while hiking in the mountainous area of Kilan, once known by locals as a “lost heaven.” However, the village has faced environmental challenges such as severe drought due to climate change and poor urban planning. The image holds a sense of both empowerment and contemplative sadness. A long journey has been made, but he looks out into the landscape as if he’s searching for more.

Akbar Golmohammadi takes a break while hiking in the mountainous area of Kilan, Iran on February 20, 2018. Locals used to call Kilan the lost heaven. But over the years, due to rising temperatures, climate change and poor urban planning, the village is experiencing severe drought and high unemployment rate.

When I speak with Ahmed, he mourns his cat that died in the bombing of his home. He tells me how each morning before the war he would collect the neighbourhood cats and feed them breakfast. Another one of his favourite past times from beforehand is planting trees. When you give to the land, it gives back to you—a mutual relationship. Caring for animals is healing when they also lend care in return, in a world that can seem so gravely uncaring. The connection to the land creates a grounding in tough times but proves difficult when it’s being stripped away from you.  Especially in a world so saturated with unchecked violence that justice remains a hope on the horizon.

Ahmed is a humanitarian aid worker, raising money to feed displaced families and children in Gaza. He and his volunteer team (@Palestinians_11) purchase food in bulk and then cook it in large metal pots for community members. Although he is facing great hardship, his work demonstrates the power of community and solidarity through these difficult times. It’s a narrative that the mainstream media often omits—the narrative of resilience. But he and his family shouldn’t have to be resilient. They deserve a peaceful life just like anyone else does. Heartbreakingly, it’s evident that Ahmed and his family are proud to be Palestinian but are only seeking to leave Gaza due to being forced out by violence, land theft, and occupation.

As Azadi’s Ordinary Grief explores through displaying the tender moments among the hurting of grief and loss, dreaming and desire can hold up a powerful mirror to the ugliness of death and destruction under tyrannical forces, genocide, and war. After all, one of the first things corrupt powers hope to steal is one’s dreams. It takes courage to dream after everything has been stolen away, to return home after years of self-exile, or to connect to the culture you attempted to suppress. A form of resistance to oppression can be living life with pride, despite the ever-present grief and dehumanization, and pushing for social change, despite the odds.

Check out Parisa Azadi’s Ordinary Grief on view at the Eyes On Main Street Photo Festival from June 1st until September 8th in Wilson, NC. 

If you’re interested in supporting Ahmed’s family, please consider sharing or donating to the campaign to help his family evacuate Gaza safely.

Complexifying this notion of truth: in conversation with Anna Karima Wane

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of a rememory that belongs to somebody else at Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki, FI). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

By Juliane Foronda

I vividly remember when I first met Anna Karima. It was in Dakar, around a table full of food, under the shade of a mango tree. Now looking back over two years later, and reconnecting in one of the most unexpected places, I can’t imagine a more fitting first encounter. 

a rememory that belongs to somebody else was recently on view from May 4 – 12 at the Museum of Impossible Forms. This solo exhibition by Helsinki-based Senegalese artist Anna Karima Wane was filled with gestures, questions, (hi)stories, rehearsals, and radical acts of hospitality that echo far beyond the formal parameters of the work. In the space, I first noticed the CRT television screens scattered across the floor playing a four-channel video titled, How to Eat a Mango, with a large rug and a seating pouf in front of the screens, inviting guests to take their time and get comfortable.

Along the wall were photographs of archival material that documented her research trip in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, coupled with hand-written journal entries ripped straight from her notebook, with their hands being present both literally in the photographs, as well as through the vulnerability of teared pages. On one wall were two longer texts that share the stories of two women in her family, Aye Touré, and her grandmother. These stories fill the space with a mix of authority and tenderness.

Finally, there was her dining table that was transported from her home in East Helsinki. On the table rests a few more journal entries, trivets with images of colonial Jamaica from her grandmother’s home, and laser engraved napkins with digitally altered images of colonial Kindia. There were also chairs around the table that gently offered themselves to host the guests, giving everyone a place to sit, consider, and rest.

Anna Karima immediately offered me a cup of mint, jasmine, and orange blossom tea upon arriving at this conversation, and told me that this is the tea that her mother makes for her back in Senegal. My hands naturally wrapped around the mug to take advantage of the warmth.

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of a rememory that belongs to somebody else at Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki, FI). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Juliane Foronda: We’re sitting here now in the middle of your exhibition at the Museum of Impossible Forms in Helsinki. How did this work come to be?

Anna Karima Wane: The first thing was The Story of Aye Touré, which I wrote in 2020 when I was first starting to look into this story. I was very inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts and thinking about the importance that is given to the archives and how we find our place within this record that has tried to erase our histories. Then going to France and going through the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in 2022, and having that experience was a little bit surreal in many ways. I remember writing in my notes that I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was taking these images of files and documents, but also wanted to show myself within it and think about my own position in this. I wanted to also bring back this idea of the gaze into it and talk about why we are doing this. This is a document. It has been kept, sure. But then, why am I looking for it? And how does me being here change the relationship to whatever this notion of truth is? The archive erases a lot of lived experiences and a lot of lived realities. I had to keep reminding myself that this is not everything. It’s interesting and you can keep going back to it, but you cannot give it too much weight.

JF: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the gaze, and maybe stretching that into ideas of performance. In the show, the video work is perhaps the most obvious performance or performative piece. But then I also see your hands being very present in the archive photographs showing that it’s your perspective, your gaze. It’s not just any generic gaze from online archive documentation, but a person’s hand is holding the documents. It’s a Black person’s hands holding them, a family member’s hands holding these things. It’s quite powerful to document yourself in these photos.

AKW: I think that at some point I was hesitant about including these images in the show, and I think I still have a lot of work to do with them and about the conversation that I want to have with my grandmother about these things that I found. I really wanted to think about this exhibition as a book in a way while thinking about how I tell these stories. Writing is also an important part for me throughout this whole experience and for my practice in general. I really wanted to write about these experiences and write about the process of going through the archive.

This idea of the exhibition as a book was a constant thought, but the first thing I considered when thinking about how the show would look was that I want it to be like a living room. And even more so, capturing the idea of my grandmother’s living room, even knowing that there’s no way I can recreate that, but I was thinking about how I can make myself comfortable within the space so that I can better host people within it. That was an important question for me because I feel like I have some concerns with exhibition-making, so I just had to think through how I would be able to create that space for myself. Up until the last minute, I was thinking if I should bring in the table, because it’s my actual dining table from my apartment, and I was just thinking about what kind of table I want to have in the space. For me, it was very important that it was the kind of table that you feel like you can gather around as opposed to a desk or work table. Once I wrote the journal entry about the tables, it was clear that I had to bring it in.

JF: You opened your exhibition text with a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I just want to expand a bit on the term “rememory” and slightly step away from Morrison’s telling of it and talk a bit about your perception or knowing of the term.

AKW: The term rememory kept coming back up, and it was something that I was really thinking about because Beloved is one of my favorite books. I thought back to the beginning of this project in 2020, when I was stuck inside like everyone else, and I was thinking a lot about motherhood and about parenthood in many ways. I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and then Are You My Mother? in close succession, and was thinking a lot about the “good enough mother” idea from Winnicott. I was reflecting a lot about that, and these ideas of anger at the mother. I started describing it almost as an anger at the mother for not being able to protect herself.

That was also something that I found in the story of Aye Touré. Just hearing it from my grandmother and the way that she was almost erased from her own story and trying to feel these “zone d’ombres,” and thinking about how to tell this story. Beloved is also in that context of thinking about this character of the mother and the choices that she has to make to protect herself and to protect her children. This idea of rememory really stuck with me for a long time – that it is a memory, but also thinking about the action. Even in the quote that I use, she talks about the moments when you walk through a memory that belongs to somebody else, and this active participation in the act of remembering and memorialising. That’s something that resonated with me.

Anna Karima Wane. Trivet from the artist’s grandmother’s home. Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: You touched a bit on the role of the archive in this work. The two of us share a deep affinity for archives and have spoken many times about all the curious things you can find in these spaces, but also the heavy bias that comes with an archive. How was your experience working in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer?

AKW: The first things I looked up before I even found these documents was “Guinea 1895 to 1910” and having this wide range of this time period that Aye Touré was there to try to get an idea of what that would have been like. I was reading all these documents and I remember writing in my notes about how the fact that this is so boring is a failure of the archive to capture real life. It was just these dry letters back and forth, they felt so sterile and divorced from reality because in these letters, it’s not like they’re organizing a picnic or something, they’re actually committing acts of violence against people and yet they managed to be completely detached from that. That was the first thing that kind of struck me throughout reading these documents. As I kept going, I just kept thinking, what if I miss something just because I got bored? I wasn’t so much interested in the documents themselves as I’m interested in what is not there, and what is in between the lines, and the things that are there are omitted a lot of the time.

JF: One thing I’ve always found quite interesting with archives is that sometimes the need to preserve kind of stops things in the archive from living or continuing to live. Maybe that’s their paradox.

AKW: I definitely agree with that. I think a lot about when you and I went to the Hotel and Restaurant Museum archives last year and I just remember that photograph of the woman making sausage. In the description, it says something like “hostess making sausage”, and in parentheses are the ingredients. That has really stayed with me because it’s not just telling you that this person is making sausage, but it’s in a way giving life to this archive by giving the recipe to follow. It made me think a lot about how you give life to the archive. I think the handwritten notes were also my way of giving life to these things.

JF: It’s also important to think of the responsibility of the archivist and those who work in collections to give them life. These conscious or unconscious decisions to omit or include certain things, or to decide what’s considered important, factual, or necessary information to include or exclude is a lot of power and responsibility.

AKW: That’s something that I think about a lot for sure. One of the first people who came to see the work spoke to me about the gap – about the fact that you’re telling a story, but you’re not telling the whole story. You’re kind of leaving these gaps and being able to kind of sit in between the gaps and not having to say “everything” because you can’t do that. I think that’s one complication of my relationship with archives, which is the fact that it’s often seen or considered as the truth, but for me, it’s more about complexifying this notion of truth. Like, what does that mean? I go back to this idea of walking through a memory that belongs to somebody else, and not taking for granted everything that is written down, but also finding these connections and relying a little bit more on things that you cannot explain.

Anna Karima Wane. Handwritten note. Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: That makes me think about the unfair assumption that written language is more powerful or more important than other forms of language or communication. I’m also curious about your use of language in the show because I find your use of language very intentional here. It’s present in various ways throughout the show whether that’s in hearing your voice talk about mangoes, seeing your handwriting, or reading the texts that you wrote. How did you navigate using language in the show? 

AKW: It was a bit instinctual and not very planned out, but from the beginning I had the idea that I was going to make a book. I think in words a lot of the time, it’s just one of my preferred forms of expression in a way. It helps me process and create connections between the things I’m thinking about. I feel very attached to writing as a practice. 

JF: There’s also the multilingual reality of your work. The entire show is in English other than the text on the archival documents, which is in French. Then thinking of maybe even communicating what you’re researching to your family, that would likely be in Wolof. And we’re in Finland, where Finnish is the primary language. For me, it’s quite curious to think of language in relation to translation. And not just translation between different languages but thinking about how we translate what we see into words, or how we translate an experience into a conversation, or something like that.

AKW: I’ve been thinking about how I’ll share this work with my family, and how the translation would have to be in that direction, strangely enough. I would have to consciously move things towards French or Wolof. There was one text that didn’t make it in, which was about Malinké, my grandmother’s language, and thinking about generational shifts, how things are being transmitted, and how we’re kind of losing a little bit as we go along. It’s also interesting that there’s so much text here, but people are still asking me what the archives are saying. I don’t know… you don’t need to know everything that is being said.

JF: It’s also interesting to think of how language and translation can be an assertion of power because you’re framing things in a certain way. The translator is the one in control of how things will be presented and how perspectives can be shifted. For example, we’ve had this conversation before about when it’s convenient to use “foreign” versus “international” when talking about people, specifically in an arts or academic context. Maybe this example is quite relevant not just to the show here, but to your lived experience in Finland so far.

AKW: Exactly. Showing this work here made me have to think through these questions in Finland, which is a white environment. So, thinking about how this work is related to my family and very personal things, it’s strange in many ways for me right now, because I do feel like I’m in a way sharing myself with people who don’t have a lot of context.

This past year I’ve been thinking a lot about my time in the USA making my bachelor thesis, which was about representation and different ways of representing and talking about Black women, and how much of that was a response to the environment and how much of that was coming out of a need to justify my presence or my existence in this space. So, when working on this, I had to think to myself, what do you want to do? and not just, how can I make everyone understand where I’m coming from? That’s been a really big question for me to try and navigate.

I’ve been reading and rereading this article called Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable by María Iñigo Clavo and they talk about artists from the Global South or from marginalized communities feeling like they need to translate that context in their work. The text was more specifically talking about Native American practices and how people are kind of shifting certain things to a Western context in a way that will make the Western audience feel like they understand, what really needs to happen for them to understand is a complete shift in their mindset.

JF: Or understand that they don’t know yet and that maybe it’s a learning opportunity for them.

AKW: Yeah exactly, it’s completely different. That’s a question that I have a lot of the time and trying to also find a certain balance. I understand that I’m here. I’m in Finland. I’m at this white institution, and this is the institution that’s going to give me a degree. But then, how do I still make things happen on my own terms without feeling like I have to completely contort myself to fit in? Because I was thinking, too, what does it mean to show this work in Finland? Do people get it?

There are so many memories in the house, so many different people who have passed through it. It’s a very charged place for me in many ways.

JF: Exactly. This show talks about Blackness, Black Ancestry, and womanhood, but it also talks about hospitality and hosting traditions in general, which are widely different in Senegal than in Nordic countries, like Finland. The way you’ve translated all of that in a way that’s understandable by the local audience, but also unwaveringly true to yourself is impressive.

It’s also interesting you say that a priority of yours during the exhibition is making connections because to me, this show is all about relationships. You said in the exhibition text that the work roots itself in the relationship you have to the women in your family, but also their relationship to the men they love and raised. Aside from that, I can also see the work itself as evidence to your relationship to place and your relationship to culture.

I think about my grandmother’s house a lot. I grew up there also, so it has been my home for many years. I think a lot about how much life there is in that house and how I’ve lived there from the beginning of it when we moved there in 2000. I feel very attached to that place specifically, and to how there are the spaces in that home that have their own choreography that have been developed over many, many years. It’s like a language that has developed over time and a comfort that has developed over time. When I go back home, I always like spending so much time in that house as well. There are so many memories in the house, so many different people who have passed through it. It’s a very charged place for me in many ways. It’s also very connected of course, to Senegalese culture in many ways in these ideas of hospitality or teranga, as we would say. I won’t say it’s unconscious, but it’s just part of the fabric of the place and of the culture I come from. Obviously, I’m always going to offer food, it’s not even a question.

JF: Exactly. I’ve experienced living and working in Nordic places for a while, so I’m familiar with the reality of what’s hospitable to some is overbearing to others, or what’s hospitality to some is vacant to others. There’s a lot of learning that there’s not one version of hospitality. There’s not one way to host.  Even if you’re practicing hospitality, that doesn’t mean that the people receiving it are necessarily feeling hosted. It’s curious how drastically hospitality can differ. What is hospitality to you, especially now being here in Finland?

I think a lot about my studio at school, where I’m sharing the biggest corner space with two of my friends and there was a lot of discussion about what that space could be. Early on, I had this talk with my studio mates, Joel and Romance, about us being able to kind of carve the space that’s open to everyone. If you have it, why not share it?

I think it really relates a lot to the text I wrote for the show about my grandmother always hosting people because as soon as I left home, I became that person. I didn’t even know. When I went to boarding school in South Africa, suddenly my room was where everyone was hanging out. In college in the US, where I lived was just like always open for people to come in and that continued to happen when I moved off campus and my mom came to visit, and she asked me: why do people always come here when they have a problem? Now there’s more intentionality behind it for sure. Now I’m trying to find my boundaries, but I think there’s a big part of me that knows that if someone needs something, I’m just going to be there.

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of How to eat a Mango (2023). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: Sometimes some people don’t realise that something exists until they experience it. Like Senegalese level of hospitality, for example. These things that are just common practice to you are suddenly extraordinary to some, and probably confusing to a lot of people as well. So, if we’re talking about what hospitality is to you, I think it’s simply you. It’s how we were raised. It’s how you live and navigate the world. It’s knowing that your ancestors are firmly watching you to make sure you offer people something.

AKW: I guess sometimes these things are just ingrained. It’s not something that is always conscious in these cases.

JF: In thinking of that and talking about school and your studio, I think it’s also important in the context of this show to talk about how this is your MFA show. Final MFA work is typically shown in a group show on campus at Uni Arts Helsinki, and you are the only person out of over fifty students to make the conscious decision to pull away from exhibiting not just in the group show, but outside of the institution completely. You instead are exhibiting your work at the Museum of Impossible Forms. Can you tell me a bit about that decision to step away from exhibiting with your class and what led you here?

AKW: Yeah, in my acknowledgements I thanked the bus driver that left me in London.  That was shitty, but it was a moment where I was just stuck in that bus station with my phone dying or dead most of the night and I just went through these cycles of thinking like, what is art? What am I doing with my life? What’s the point of all this? And then in the next five minutes, I was writing all these ideas for new work. I was also thinking about what it means for me to show my work in this white institution, and how I want my work to be seen. At that point, I already had questions, but I hadn’t even had my biggest problems with the school yet, to be honest. It was just starting. 

Finland is very specific. This is not the first time I moved countries, yet I feel completely lost because their system has so many rules, and there’s no support or guidance for international students. I also don’t feel heard in many ways. Especially on issues like racism, there’s a lot of ignorance. I remember this class that I took my first semester, which was about documentary in contemporary art and the teacher talked about the history of documentary. After a few days of class, I realised that I was going to have to be the one to bring up colonialism because the teacher had still not brought it up at all. I studied documentary in college so I couldn’t understand how you can speak about the history of documentary and not talk about that, and not talk about how documentary in many ways was started to capture the other. I eventually spoke up and said that I feel like the history of documentary is very much rooted in the oppression of marginalized people, and then the teacher just goes, “okay,” and that was it. It made me think a lot about why it is often the labour of the person of color to bring up racism, racial injustice, or racial ignorance.

JF: Yeah, we know that institutions are rarely safe spaces for those in the global margins, but I’m curious about what your Finnish peers are doing when they hear about your experiences. Are they standing with you? Are they the ones speaking up and calling this stuff out?

Yeah, I do feel like I found some people who do. I mean, Finland is really white and ignorant overall, but I’ve never met allies like I’ve met here. Of course, the people who are in charge still are not listening or don’t care and that’s unfortunate. 

JF: I do want to speak a bit more about not only the active choice to not have this show affiliated with the institution, but more so the choice to step out on your own.

AKW: The first thing I wrote during that sleepless night at the London bus station was, “You want to put them on shaky ground.” What I meant by that line was the impression I got from my school was that: you are invited, but this is not yours, this is not for you. So, we come in with the feeling of being an unwanted guest in a way. I knew that I couldn’t exhibit at the school because it’s so much about consumption, and I did not want my work to be there. And I don’t want to be tokenized. This work is extremely important to me and is extremely personal, and I don’t want it to be consumed in that way. I’m also concerned with the intentionality of people who will come. Not everyone is going to come here and that’s okay.

The Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF) is one of the spaces that hosts exhibitions without charging artists, which is rare in Helsinki. Their mission statement is very much involved in practices that deal with archives, and that deal with BIPOC, and are centered around people whose voices are not always heard in the mainstream Helsinki art scene. For me, it was kind of obvious at a certain point. I had a studio visit with Chris Wessels, one of the co-founders of MIF who I had connected with at one of their events. We had a lot of conversations around the work so I reached out to him about if MIF would host my MFA exhibition. Maybe it was also the right time because they had just moved here a month and a half ago and this is the first exhibition in this new space. It’s been a good space for this work and allowed for it to stretch out, which I wouldn’t have had at school for sure.

JF: Yeah, it’s easy to say as we’re currently sitting in the exhibition itself, but this is a complete show. It’s not a one-off project to fulfill something in class. This is work that in many ways, you started well before your MFA, before you knew that you would be showing in Finland. It’s a solo exhibition in its own right and it being your MFA work is (at least to me) very secondary to it.

AKW: I feel I was lucky, and I am incredibly grateful. Not just to MIF for hosting, but to the many people who have supported me through this process. Many of my friends are also working on their own thesis and still found time to help and support me in various ways. It all leads back to community… I had a whole part in my thesis about “What is community?”. 

JF: Well, what is community?

AKW: What is community? I don’t have the answer. 

JF: You have a whole section in your thesis.

AKW: I do have a whole section. It was mostly questions, let me tell you. I feel like working on this project and making this exhibition, I’ve been held up and supported by many people, and by a community of people. I think I didn’t expect it either. I’ve been running around talking about community building and doing all this stuff to try and make it happen. I quickly realized that the school and the institution were not interested, but that it was resonating with other people. I just feel like in making this show, I’ve also felt like the energy that I was putting out, I was kind of experiencing firsthand.

To check out more of Anna Karima Wane’s work visit her website or Instagram.

Labour Care: A Poem & Conversation with Camila Salcedo

Photo of Labour Pains curated by Emma Steen for Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts at Workers Arts & Heritage Centre. Photo by Carolyn Combs.

By Kalina Nedelcheva

Labour Pains, an exhibition curated by Toronto-based curator and writer Emma Steen for Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts 2024 at Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, takes the body of the precarious worker as a starting point. Within the context of a capitalist system that approaches the body as a tool to be exploited in the name of profit — where accessibility and support often come as an afterthought or are completely ignored — the body is in constant danger of breaking down. Labour Pains surveys the challenges workers with varying needs and abilities face while accessing healthcare. Steen brings artists Camila Salcedo, Peter Morin, and Sean Lee and Birdie Gerhl together to explore the uncertainty of freelance employment, Indigenous relations to healthcare, disability, accessibility, and Crip Politics. The exhibition frames healthcare as a labour rights issue while shedding light on the sinister capitalist and social structures that prevent healthcare from being accessible for all.

The following interview is an experimental conversation with multi-disciplinary artist Camila Salcedo who contributed a series of care objects to the exhibition. Through a series of conversations with artists and cultural workers who have experienced serious brain injuries, Camila reimagines homemade remedies through a creative lens. While the objects figure as acts of care from one precarious worker to another, they also touch upon the risk of healthcare privatization for freelance artists and the financial strain unexpected illnesses or injuries can have on the precarious body. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s playful approach to guiding attention to bodily ails under capitalism, the interviewer paired each question with a poetic verse that reflects and responds to Camila’s practice and the ethos of Labour Pains in general.

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

stone-walled to

hear my thoughts;

misshapen and delirious,

though, still here;

at least they’re still here;

What has been your experience with the healthcare system?

Camila: I’ve noticed that doctors don’t have a lot of time and often, you have to advocate for yourself a lot within the healthcare system. Nurses and other types of healers — like massage therapists and chiropractors — have been angels in my experience because they pay attention to the emotional aspects of health issues; they’ve treated me more like a human being whereas oftentimes doctors just want you in and out. Doctors want you to get better as quickly as possible so you can return to the capitalist lifestyle.

It is apparent to me how little mental health supports exist to guide one in dealing with the healthcare system. It is not very holistic. I’ve also had drastically different experiences, depending on whether I was covered by insurance or not at the time of my visit. When you don’t have insurance, it is more difficult to navigate the system.

It is apparent to me how little mental health supports exist to guide one in dealing with the healthcare system.

Emotional support and mental health integration in the healthcare system is necessary and should be a priority. Recently, I’ve been reading a few books — one of which is The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté — that point out how stress can cause different types of illnesses and issues to the body. There is a huge correlation between experiencing stress and the efficacy of healthcare that is missed.

keep working, still working

still working, keep working;

I feel my body rumble

because of the intensity but

my thoughts are calm;

they must be calm.

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

How do you embody the precarity freelance workers experience in the healthcare system through your art?

C: I am an artist who is in a precarious situation and that seeps into my work because when I don’t have funding, I am unable to make the work. That in itself is part of my process. The pieces I made for Labour Pains also touched on this. I interviewed three individuals —  musician and facilitator Carmel Farahbakhsh, curator and educator Patricia Ritacca, and musician and media artist Katie Kotler — who’ve had brain injuries in different capacities. I asked what tools help them in alleviating their symptoms and had conversations with them about the challenges they’ve experienced in accessing care.

With Carmel, we discussed how there should be more funding for administrative assistance for disabled folks. With brain injuries, people might have difficulties being on screens so there needs to be additional support that would help with that. In my conversation with Patricia, we chatted about insurance and how not having access to physio and other types of care work can exacerbate symptoms. These conversations informed the works I made for Carmel, Patricia, and Katie. I wanted these wearable art pieces to respond to their symptoms while visually conveying some of the topics that came up in our conversation. Katie, for example, spoke about how brain injuries are invisible, even within queer and disabled communities. People may not often believe you because you’re not showing physical symptoms of pain. I used neon colors in Katie’s pieces to account for that. It was also important to draw on their personal style because I find that a lot of disability tools are clunky and ugly. I wanted my pieces to be fun and something my interviewees would want to wear. I see it as a labour of care toward them because when I had intense symptoms, they really created a sense of community care for me.

Speaking to each other can be a huge help in navigating the system. Wage transparency is a great example of this. For people with chronic pain, discussing and sharing strategies about how you are making it work is important. Spaces like Tangled Arts and Mayworks Festival are doing a great job; they really consider disabled artists. I do think access is improving over time in the arts sector but I want to see more of it. In one of my recent curatorial projects with Mending the Museum, we put a clause in the artist contract that stated if the artist experienced any sort of health issue that prevented them from completing the work, we’d still honor paying them for their time. I’ve had students in the past who’ve paid for my sewing classes asking me for additional time and resources. We need to be aware that sometimes someone might not be able to show up in a timely way or deliver within a specific timeline. There is no such thing as an art emergency. There is no rush, even though the world tells us that there is. I would like to see more art spaces embrace that mentality.

it’s locked away

behind the pain of labour,

a hand reaching out;

still reaching,

keep reaching;

it grasps at the thread of my hope.

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

What are the remedies for your labour pain? Are they obedient/disobedient (toward the system)?

C: I’ve tried navigating the terms of stability versus instability as an artist and explored to what degree I felt okay inhabiting those levels of comfort. At times, this meant having part-time jobs in order to sustain my practice but after spending two weeks in the hospital last year with severe health problems, this is no longer the case for now. Even though I don’t discard it as a possibility, I am unable to work an office job in the same way right now.

in the realm of precarity—

health, is it only for some

and not for others?

how do we decide?

How do you categorize the objects you exhibit in Labour Pains?

C: My objects can be described as helpers. The work is about caring for each other and wearable art is an expression of that but also a tool. My goal is to honor and take care of my community in response to how these folks have shown me care throughout the years.

hope that there is better,

hope that there is care;

what is care?

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

Are there any radical ‘traditions’ for the healthcare system that you feel would be useful to a movement toward healthcare for all?

C: Community care happens naturally. At the opening of Labour Pains, Emma Steen, the curator, mentioned that without being prompted all the artists in the exhibition incorporated people they worked with in their artworks. It was evident that collaboration and coming together within the community was really important for this project.

Anytime I’ve experienced heavy health problems, I’ve been bolstered by an entire community of friends, family, and chosen family. Community Care should be translated more systemically within the healthcare system. We should have a team helping us out and not one singular doctor who refers us to a specialist. People have specialties but it would be better to have multiple people helping to come to a solution to your health problem. We should have a therapist, a nurse, and so on. They should be able to communicate better with each other too. I think that would really help. There should also be more accessible ways to access health insurance. We do have free healthcare in Canada but there are so many levels of care that are more holistic and natural that are not covered. Oftentimes, those are more useful. Family doctors usually prescribe you medication whereas other types of care work help you more somatically.

You can find more of Camila Salcedo’s artistic work, workshop offerings, and practice on their website and Instagram. For more information on Labour Pains and the wonderful artists involved in the project — visit the Mayworks Festival website here.

In Discussion with Nicole Chaput: Disobedient Women

Nicole Chaput. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed in Spice], 2024
9 oil on bleached denim paintings stretched on custom made wooden canvases mounted on a rotating wooden and stainless-steel structure of three tiers, base composed of 9 pigmented concrete cylinders. Photo by Davit Cruz Puebla, Cortesía del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

By Naomi Oko

Embodying what it truly means to be a contemporary artist, Nicole Chaput profoundly toys with and reshapes the dated, conventional, and familiar representation of women and femininity throughout art history. Deeper than the need for expression via painting, is her calling to be a storyteller. She stands as a messenger for and a mouthpiece to the feminine entities she creates, mediating between the feminine in its unruly essence and its traditional representation in materiality. Chaput disrupts established but tired norms, actively manipulating anatomical forms and the materiality of the canvas itself in her search to blur the boundaries between the juxtaposition of what is good and bad, celestial and demonic, or inside and outside. Her oeuvre stands as an excitingly interesting and new inspection and exploration of traditionally feminine portrayal, challenging the ever-present and ever-stifling oppression of existence under the scrutiny of the male gaze. Chaput’s figures serve as more than mere eye candy but rather, as she describes it herself; [as manifestations of the] “defiance and resilience born from enduring hostility. Similar to pearls, which form unique layers as a defense mechanism, her paintings evolve organically, embracing their own anomalies as a testament to their existence.”


Nicole Chaput, born in 1995, is a painter who lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). She has received numerous grants and fellowships from prestigious institutions during her artistic career; and has shown her work in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed with spice] is a solo exhibition by Nicole Chaput curated by Isabel Sonderéguer at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, that ran from February 10 – April 21, 2024.

Nicole Chaput. Femme Fillet Formalism. 2023. 2.10 x 1.30 x 15 cm. Oil on bleached and primed denim, hand-sewn silver polyester applications, mounted on custom made wooden stretcher and concrete booties.

Your presentation of femininity and comparison to traditional representations in art calls to mind angels, and the comparison between biblically accurate representation versus secular Western representation in terms of accuracy, conformity, and digestibility. Can you explain this further?

My work is pretty intuitive and research-based because it’s trying to inspect the inspector and the inspector is Western art history. I’m really interested in how women have been represented in that area. And for that, I needed to read a lot about the dissonances. Your first question is so on point because It’s a great example of how I connect art history with storytelling and how an image can tell the story of a misrepresented body to create an idea of femininity. 

I constantly get into discussions about Mary Magdalene. I am obsessed with her as a figure because just by seeing how she has been represented throughout history, you can get a [sense] of the ideals of women at a certain time and the ideologies that paved the way. For example, how women must obey, how women must not act, what is considered beautiful or sexy, for example. 

Nicole Chaput. Sangre Rubia. Oil on bleached denim mounted on custom wooden stretcher. Photo by Ramiro Chaves, Cortesía de Galería Agustina Ferreyra. Courtesy of the artist.

I feel like I created this algorithm of how my research is catalyzed and by chance, I ran into this image of Mary Magdalene covered in hair, like she’s an animal. I became very upset with how she was being represented so I began to question what happened that she had to be represented in that way. I kept reading about her in the bible and in the actual text there was nothing that mentioned or cued why she ended up being represented as an animal. 

Reading about the history of her representation, you can tell that, at first, she’s depicted as this woman who is bathing Jesus’ feet. She discovers Jesus when he is risen, but also by Tintoretto and all these other pictures, she becomes this very sexy woman who has long hair, and then she becomes an animal in a cave in France, then she becomes a hermit doing penance for her sins.

I think that the disruption between the actual tale and how art has illustrated the story is very divergent. A lot of people at the time were illiterate, so images became a theatricalized version of the story and the agenda that the religion was pushing. Iconography has been a storyteller throughout time and images have their own language that we don’t all have access to what we are reading or who is the writer. I think that is the main perversity of images that we see there, we don’t have enough information to analyze who the person saying all of this is or why we are having these subliminal images planted in our heads. I think that happened with Mary Magdalene and it happens today with Kendall Jenner selling us lipstick, this image of a woman that appears to you like a vision followed by this internalization of that face or that idea of sensuality, or beauty, or the grotesque. 

I’m very interested in how these images are like divine apparitions or hallucinations, we can ignore them or dismiss them, but they’ll make some sort of impact on how we read history, or how we read the body. 

Nicole Chaput. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed in Spice], 2024
9 oil on bleached denim paintings stretched on custom made wooden canvases mounted on a rotating wooden and stainless-steel structure of three tiers, base composed of 9 pigmented concrete cylinders. Photo by Davit Cruz Puebla, Cortesía del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

What sort of reaction do you imagine your work elicits in the ideal audience? Have you had the opportunity to be with some of your audience to see them reacting to your work for the first time?

Yes, it’s one of the things I enjoy the most. The first ones that come to mind are when I had my show Venus Atomica at Galería Karen Huber. It was my first formal solo Gallery show and the last day I visited, I saw this whole family taking a selfie with one of the works as if it was this deity of some sort. I wanted those works to feel like they had power or like they had a soul contained inside of them. It was great when I saw that because they’re doing this touristy thing where they are visiting this goddess-form that they don’t completely understand, but they find beautiful, important, and mysterious.

Recently, in the show I have in Museo de Carrillo Gil, called Embalsamada con Picante, there was this little girl who was about four years old with her dad who was also carrying her sister. He was entering to see the work and she was very scared to go inside the room. Then slowly, she walked in grabbing onto his legs and she pointed out one of the works that is like a medusa. She was crying and I asked her dad why she was crying and instead of saying she was sad or something he said, “she’s emotional.” In Spanish, that didn’t sound like, “Oh yeah, she’s being emotional or irrational,” it was like, “she’s feeling a lot.” It was so beautiful to see how this little girl could connect to that image and feel her feelings. And that translated into emotion and not automatically demonizing her feelings. It was great to see how she slowly leaned into the room and started getting to know these figures. 

Nicole Chaput. Medusa Deluxe. Oil on bleached denim mounted on custom wooden stretcher.Photo by Ramiro Chaves, Cortesía de Galería Agustina Ferreyra. Image courtesy of the artist.

Can you expand on the celestial nature of your work?

I am very inspired by images of celestial beings and also by Celestial beings from the underworld. In Spanish, I like to call these figures, “infra cuerpos,” which would mean “under bodies”, but in Spanish, “infra” doesn’t connote something that is below. The “belowness” is more like they are from this esoteric hell, so they are ardent, not underneath. So, they are bodies that are in this area of not well behaved. Like Mary Magdalene, she is both celestial and this is also [depicted as] this whore that should burn in flames. 

For me, it’s important to emphasize the narrative of how painting can fictionalize itself, similar to the ways women too can fictionalize themselves. Via my installation, we’re able to explore just how those two can come together to create an experience of uncovering and discovering something new while being completely disoriented by your understanding of its ingredients separately but confused and disoriented by their combination and juxtapositioning. One is left with questions like; is it the past or the future? Are we in heaven or hell? Are they angelic or demonic? I think that all of those contradictions coexist in one body: the superficial with the subcutaneous and the visceral with the hyper-airbrushed face. Disorienting someone makes them have to relearn where they are to reorient themselves. 

Nicole Chaput. Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca, 2022. Four anthropomorphized femme cosmetic instruments (mirror, comb, mascara, powder brush) displayed on wooden and velvet badalone. Each instrument is accompanied by a surreal user manual written by the artist and presented in an acrylic frame. Instruments: oil on wood, silicone mascara wand and hand-dyed wood. Installation view of solo show at Biquini Wax ESP, Mexico City.

Your wooden sculptures from Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca resemble ritualistic objects in their form and context. Would you consider the beautification objects to stand as a metaphor for the sacredness of the routines they help in? 

I think that these routines are sacred in an intuitive way, but also in a capitalist way. That was the commentary I was doing in the show or, the question I was asking/answering. These objects were very beautiful and intricate, and I wanted to capture the magic of when you go to the makeup store and just how the packaging is so beautiful to make it an object of desire. The packaging just projects this feeling of luxury and how it’s going to give you the power to be beautiful. Beauty itself is the most political thing because it’s guarded by the most colonial and patriarchal standards. I think that beauty is this thing where we either have the power or we don’t. Makeup is this thing that can give us the power to be more beautiful, more captivating, have more power, and therefore take up more space.

…Makeup and beauty constantly create these images to orient ourselves throughout territories, how we move around the world, how our body is just existing, and how it’s perceived by the other.

This is a construct by consumerist culture but also, I think that there is something empowering in creating these rituals for oneself because they situate you in your own body. They can help you create an appearance or a mask. There is this great anecdote that I love about Marisol the artist, who I’m greatly inspired by. She goes to this party and she’s wearing a Japanese mask. Everyone at the party wonders who she is and asks her to remove the mask. She doesn’t remove it until a while later after they keep pressing her. She removes the mask and has full makeup on, so they can’t see her face. 

I think that’s such a great anecdote because makeup and beauty constantly create these images to orient ourselves throughout territories, how we move around the world, how our body is just existing, and how it’s perceived by the other. Being seen by the other is very present in my life. In me being a woman and living in Mexico, the eye of the other is always there. It just doesn’t go away, it’s ever-present. Haunting, even. 

Painters construct how the eye flows in a picture plane. This is done by contrast, color, texture, et cetera. Formally painting marks draws the path for the eye in a place. I think that similarly, women do this all the time to control when we are seen and when we are not. In that same way, I think it is important in my work to be able to give the women I am representing, volume. Because the idea of flatness and volume in a woman’s body is this canonical culture of where you should have flesh and where you shouldn’t. At the same time, an image in art history is flat and without volume, even volume as sound and volume as shape and space. It’s not decided by the women that are being represented. It’s decided by someone else. If my work would have a volume, I think it would be very high and it wouldn’t be very pleasant. I think about the voices these women would have, and how some of them would maybe cry, like the myth of La Llorona in Mexico, who hauntingly cries for her children.

I had never thought about the voices they would have, but I think it would be interesting because we know so much about, for example, Frida Kahlo as an image, but her voice is very mysterious to us.  And doing that exercise of how strong the voice of these women would be, or how much space it would occupy is important as well. The voice matters as much as the face and the face gives it the voice. As I said, Mary Magdalene would be one of the mothers of my sculptures and Marisol would be one of my mothers artistically. I love to think about genealogy, making a genealogical tree, and to think of contemporary ideas as family inside the world we are creating as artists.

Nicole Chaput. Woman-Comb and Instructions (Detail of Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca).34 x 14 x 2,5 cm. Oil on cut wood. 2022.

You make use of a lot of accessorizing and beautification and yet, the figures still come out resembling these alien strange beings. Do you see your work as an intentional commentary on how people, women especially, go through so much in the process of beautification that sometimes they end up morphing into whole other beings? 

I think that there is this collective dysmorphia of how we want to look and how we want others to see us so much that it’s never enough and it becomes opaque. Many models have been instrumentalized to sell more things, right? And to endure this concept of European beauty standards that leave a lot of women out and create this very narrow idea of femininity. A lot of these Hollywood icons are canons of beauty, but when they start aging, they are not the same as the image we have of them in our heads. I think that these tools for beautification, they’re anthropomorphized women who are grabbed by women to beautify themselves and then be objectified. It’s like this cycle where subjects and objects bleed into each other in a way that they’re almost inseparable.

Nicole Chaput. Woman-Comb and Instructions (Detail of Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca).34 x 14 x 2,5 cm. Oil on cut wood. 2022.

And in that sense, there’s also this funny aspect or fun aspect where the tools with their manuals, they can pull your hair, or they can bite you. They have some sort of autonomy. These wooden tools, the sculptures, have a user manual that is kind of surreal and it speaks to the power of these tools. For example, the mascara wand is an Oracle or the mirror and spits out a flesh-eating worm. I wouldn’t want to look in that mirror. It goes to question these beauty icons, and what their mirror view looks like. What do they see? Especially for [those who] have done so much plastic surgery that they have become totally different people. I can imagine that when you go through that much physical transformation, your psyche is transformed as well. That physical trauma of the surgery, I feel like it speaks to a trauma that is inside. And that trauma inside that wound, I’m very moved by it.

And I think that the image we have as women is that of a wound. And I wonder how we can heal it, or what it would take to look at ourselves without having our eyes played by the male gaze. I think that is the question that encompasses all my work. I don’t have an answer yet, but as I’m making it, I feel more at peace with looking at myself in a mirror.

Beautification has become such a mechanical process in the way it’s carried out and even spoken of, that it’s kind of lost its sacred magic. Your work in Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca ritualizes, romanticizes, and even sexualizes the process involved. Is this something we should all be opening our minds towards when viewing, despite the oppressive nature of conformity?  

Yes, I think it could be very liberating to start seeing everything as a story or as fiction and as different characters. In this work, the comb, the mirror, the mascara brush, and the powder brush are all characters. The installation was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast rose which has this beautiful pink light emanating from it. Next to the rose is a mirror where Belle can see the rest of the world. Instead of seeing herself, she can see as if she were looking at something that is not there. So, that kind of magical tool or magical process I think can lead us to self-invention.

The power of self-invention comes with language, with what each sign means. Having long lashes has certain connotations, having long nails as well. They’re also more related to how animals spread their nails when they want to attack. I think that the way we accessorize our bodies and fictionalize our appearances is by using prosthetics like lashes and nails, for example. All of these prosthetics add to the story of our body. I think we can find a way where those prosthetics are not only accessories for the other, but, thinking about Wonder Woman, where all her accessories have superpowers, like self-defense. If our prosthetics could have superpowers, or if we can imagine, through fiction, what the things we add to our bodies could do? Not just in terms of image, but in terms of narrative. 

Nicole Chaput. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed in Spice], 2024. 9 oil on bleached denim paintings stretched on custom made wooden canvases mounted on a rotating wooden and stainless-steel structure of three tiers, base composed of 9 pigmented concrete cylinders. Photo by Davit Cruz Puebla, Cortesía del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

Trends and beauty standards change, courtesy of pop culture and mass media consumption. Women’s bodies kind of go in and out of style, almost like vehicles. I like the contrast created between your representation of women as complete sufficient beings as opposed to the mass message being pushed of women eternally needing changes and tweaks just to fit in and exist. How does your work touch more on this topic?

In Embalsamada con picante, I created one woman with three heads, three torsos, and three legs that has 27 possible combinations. What was important to me was that each fragment was autonomous and was a whole, not a part. All the bottoms have heads and faces. The legs have a face, the skirt has a face, and the snail creature that looks kind of like Naomi Campbell has a face as well. 

I think of fragments as a pole that is cut from a larger portion of a thing but can live on its own. When you cut one limb off a salamander, another one grows. I love how Donna Haraway says that maybe we should all cut off our limbs to have new bodies that are monstrous and surprise us in their own regenerative processes. Part of my hope with this show and with my work is that there is a wound and I am going off from an iconographic stump. I think the iconography is basically women trapped inside geometric shapes, their bodies are stumps, and they’re mutilated, so I try to imagine what can grow from those stumps and that regenerative process of the icon and the body.

It’s so amazing to do the exercise of imagining what would grow if we continued having the body grow out of its frame. I think that the irregular figures of all my canvases speak to the intent of having this regenerative process that has its own functionality and intelligence. It’s not necessarily thinking about the other, but it’s thinking about how it exists in the world and the necessities it has; it needs to survive or to evolve even.

You can find more of Nicole Chaput’s work on her Instagram.

Part Two: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

In this two-part dialogue, spanning contemporary feminist theory to modernist art criticism, independent curator Ash Barbu and interdisciplinary artist Natalie Bruvels reflect on the relationship between maternal caregiving and collaborative authorship. Specifically, they discuss the recent exhibition Walk in the Park (2023) created by Cat Attack Collective, an artist duo consisting of Bruvels and her 11-year-old son, Tomson. Walk in the Park transforms the white cube Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery into an expansive environment that blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday. Building from the prior exhibition Abound (2022), presented at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the installation incorporates co-created paintings and sculptures of recycled, accessible materials that intersect and overspill. In the exchanges that follow, through considerations of accumulation, refiguration, and immersion, Barbu and Bruvels propose readings of ethics and aesthetics that foreground the inherited context of the work of art.

Ash Barbu: Perhaps we can turn to the various symbols that appear and reappear throughout Walk in the Park. It is an unusual environment that strays from anything we commonly associated with “the natural.” First, my mind travels to the paintings of Roblox gameplay.

Natalie Bruvels: Something I continue to grapple with is the all-at-once feeling being a mother. Recently, I started using Roblox imagery in my work. I used to paint solely from screenshots—these scenes seemed too cool and distant. Eventually, I found pleasure in adding traces, stencils, and layers from the so-called real world. The process simply felt more tactile. Some might assume that I’m addressing the effects of video game culture in the work. In a way, I’m engaging in this discourse, however it isn’t a negative commentary. Roblox was how I could see our family during COVID. These works are family portraits. It is as if the camera, the screenshot, acts as an additional family member. These scenes are tender-hearted, although Roblox doesn’t necessarily look that way.

AB: On representing nature, we should also describe the walls, covered with layers of colourful plastic tablecloths.

NB: Some viewers have a strong reaction to the use of plastic based on environmental ethics. Working with my kid, I find it a useful, workable medium. From a practical standpoint, it is reusable. And I don’t need to clean up after. I can put the sheets in a bag and store them away. Over time, they develop their own character. The more I return to them, the more I might shred them. Sometimes they look like tentacles and sometimes they look like the sky—you never quite know. Too often, we turn to artists with an angst that is rooted in our collective inability to solve environmental problems. In fact, throughout the installation, I’m strategically eliciting judgments. Because you cannot be a mother and walk through this world without judgements.

“You need to be able to provide, you need to be able to think on the fly and problem-solve, you need to be a warm presence they can turn to when they are sick…”

Finally, I’m interested in the reasons why we feel compelled to use these materials in the first place. We might see them at a birthday party, for example. The function of these colourful spaces is simply to say: “I love you.” They have power to communicate the message: “I care you’re here—let’s find a way through this together.” From these different considerations, the plastic allows me to think through the complex processes of mothering. You need to be able to provide, you need to be able to think on the fly and problem-solve, you need to be a warm presence they can turn to when they are sick—all these things are true simultaneously.

Still, I find that I have this fantastic chip on my shoulder. It wasn’t until I attended Andrea O’Reilly’s seminar that I gave myself permission to think about motherhood in a feminist way. Forming that connection, you don’t feel so alone. You don’t feel like a deficient mother. This is what writers like Adrienne Rich were concerned with in the 1970s, namely the everyday experience of mothering coupled with the classist, patriarchal, racist institution of motherhood.

AB: As a poet, Rich also interrogated how this institution is inherited and thus recreated from one generation to the next. I’m thinking of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), where she writes about invisible domestic labour and cyclical gendered violence. For Rich, it is violence that belongs to a culture of silence. Your work contends with the contemporary cultural resonance of this silence. Having this conversation, then, we seem most interested in the words unsaid by the Madonna of the “Madonna and Child.” Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna (c. 1504-05), for example, offers the viewer legibility. A certain visual transmissibility is at stake. Alternatively, with Walk in the Park,the landscape is rendered abstract. That landscape is unsettled as we move into opacity. A park is supposed to be a shared space. We read books, we watch birds, we visit friends—all in the company of perfect strangers. I think this feeling of community is fictional, though.

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

NB: Let’s say that our experience of the park is not all the same. A mother is providing care and working to keep it all together on her own.

AB: To the passer-by, the depth of her experience, the context of her arrival, is easily overlooked. A park setting is fundamentally a public setting that is structured according to some contract of social acceptability. Yet Walk in the Park makes visible what has been rendered invisible. That is, we see the physical and emotional labour of maternal caregiving. This is not a walk in the forest. It is a walk in a park, which is itself a constructed environment. In this rethinking of that constructed environment, there is an expansion and contraction between private and public worlds. Here, an aesthetic reinvention occurs. The park is no longer a seamless, smooth surface of leisure activity. It is a texture—an inherited context. The work is doing more with less. And that feminist sense of maximalism offers us the chance to rethink the canon of Western art history. Many would argue that minimalism represents the height of modernism, where the painted surface and sculptural form become indistinguishable through the absolute reduction of the image. Highlighting the maximalism of Cat Attack Collective, we are not simply asking: What is painting? What is sculpture? What is art? But instead: Who is an artist? What is a studio? What is the relationship between maternal caregiving and artistic production?

NB: It makes people upset when you show them this side of art.

AB: According to that inherited myth of modernist art, the studio is a private space where the genius closes his door to the world and goes to work on a masterpiece. I think about Brancusi’s recently recreated studio at the Centre Pompidou and the ways in which this privileged space becomes fetishized. A copy of a copy of a room filled with nearly priceless phallic objects—there is perhaps no greater metaphor for the historical durability of these relations.

Cat Attack Collective, Rough Around the Edges, 2020, University of Ottawa MFA Final Critique. Image: Cara Tierney.

NB: Our work is maximalist with a Dollar Store budget. The artist Jenny McMaster called it “messimalism.” I think about the notion of spilling over from a feminist theoretical perspective. The emphasis on plastic originated from practical considerations leading up to an MFA critique. I was grouping my paintings together into one expansive blob. Tomson’s work was on the other side of the room in a smaller formation. The two bodies were approaching each other, almost touching. But the surface underneath looked like a studio wall—it became distracting. I needed color quickly. And it needed to be inexpensive.

AB: The plastic tablecloths are readymade. They also behave as a connective tissue, a second skin for the gallery walls. In this sense, Walk in the Park rejects the visual logic of the white cube gallery. What the white cube shares with the park setting is the myth of neutrality—the fiction of a common ground. In the installation, the ground of meaning emerges from a place of visual and material excess that is, paradoxically, tied to a series of constraints. It is, as you suggest, a context that spills over. It is a textured surface of meaning that begins, first and foremost, with the question of feminist worldmaking.

NB: Returning to the question of legibility, I don’t think children are viewing the installation as an aesthetic reinvention of the park or an interrogation of modernist neutrality. In the busyness of creating the work, you don’t have time to sit and enjoy it until much, much later. For me, that much, much later, came the day before the show closed. I could feel the space. It made me emotional because I saw it as beautiful. I was proud of what we were able to do. I was having a heartfelt introspective moment when several children came in running, laughing, and screaming. And that is how they view this space. So, legibility varies.


AB: Walk in the Park offers a feminist critique of maternal erasure that is born from sensorial pleasure. For any viewer of any age, that visual excess is the pull inward. But what is made visible only scratches the surface of an inherited context, in art and life.

Read part one of Barbu and Bruvels’s discussion here.

Ash Barbu is a writer, curator, and researcher who holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. A recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, they have produced numerous group exhibitions foregrounding the limits of reparative visibility, including Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts (2023). Their recent writings have appeared in publications such as OnCurating, Peripheral Review, and Esse art + opinions. Barbu lectures on queer theory and trans studies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Cat Attack Collective consists of Natalie Bruvels and her son, Tomson. They are a multidisciplinary collective working primarily in painting and large-scale installations. Established in 2020, Cat Attack Collective has exhibited at the University of Ottawa, Art Mûr, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and along the Greenboro Pathway as part of Microcosm, the City of Ottawa Public Art Program’s COVID-19 pilot initiative.

Natalie Bruvels holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory, both from the University of Ottawa. She is currently enrolled in the Feminist and Gender Studies PhD program at the University of Ottawa. Bruvels is researching maternal subjectivity in art and visual culture, while advocating for caregiving supports in a university setting. Bruvels has presented the work of Cat Attack Collective at various academic conferences, including the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, Florida. She has subsequently published writing in The Journal of Mother Studies.

Tomson is in grade six and is happy to be back at school in person to spend more time with his friends. He loves dodgeball and has a special affinity for zip-ties as an artistic material. He is the youngest artist to have his work exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery.  

Part One: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

In this two-part dialogue, spanning contemporary feminist theory to modernist art criticism, independent curator Ash Barbu and interdisciplinary artist Natalie Bruvels reflect on the relationship between maternal caregiving and collaborative authorship. Specifically, they discuss the recent exhibition Walk in the Park (2023) created by Cat Attack Collective, an artist duo consisting of Bruvels and her 11-year-old son Tomson. Walk in the Park transforms the white cube Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery into an expansive environment that blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday. Building from the prior exhibition Abound (2022), presented at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the installation incorporates co-created paintings and sculptures of recycled, accessible materials that intersect and overspill. In the exchanges that follow, through considerations of accumulation, refiguration, and immersion, Barbu and Bruvels propose readings of ethics and aesthetics that foreground the inherited context of the work of art.

Ash Barbu: I often think about research as a parallel life process in which we grant ourselves the freedom to move beyond the limits of the merely possible. Having recently completed the first year of your doctoral studies, how does your academic work reflect your experience as a mother?

Natalie Bruvels: I’m drawn to the concept of the postmaternal, coined and developed by theorist Julie Stephens. This term offers a useful framework to address how caregiving, maternal subjectivities, and maternal epistemologies are erased in university spaces. It is also a framework that allows us to examine how the catastrophic effects of this erasure are objectified in visual culture. During this period of research as a PhD student, I have immersed myself in different concerns about maternal theory. The layered experiences of mothers are incredibly diverse and need to be taught. And they need to be taught in a feminist way. After all, caregiving is a component of reproductive justice. For the time being, I’m exploring questions of pedagogy rooted in a post-structuralist analysis of words that don’t yet exist—words that we need to make sense of our experiences. In the previous year, completing my MA during the pandemic, I don’t think I saw anyone. Researching and homeschooling was difficult. But I had the opportunity to take Andrea O’Reilly’s maternal theory course at York University, which saved my sanity. To be clear, it saved my life as a researcher. It was the first time I saw someone get up in front of a class and unapologetically create space for this discussion.

AB: In academia, sometimes we wander into what feels like an empty landscape. It can be intimidating to create space for yourself lacking the comforts of disciplinary foundations. At the same time, it is a sign there is more to be done there. What we need is more, not less disruption. How do these theoretical interventions on the postmaternal figure in your artistic practice?

NB: A few years prior, during my time in the MFA program, I began thinking about caregiving through alternative forms of collaboration. I always liked the idea of Tomson and I coming to the Visual Arts Building on weekends. As a parent, you try to give your child experiences that will stay with them. I decided we should go ahead and create something new. It was a learning experience, as I had to rethink the meanings we traditionally assign to authorship.

To begin, I assumed that the work would be prescriptive—that we would follow my idea. I quickly realized, though, that I couldn’t be in control. Yes, I’m responsible for this individual’s safety and well-being. But he is going to do exactly what he wants to do, for as long as he wants to do it. What I want to say, though, is that the work is freeing. Completing an MFA, you’re often probed and expected to have the answers. To say that I can’t anticipate where this work will lead in the future might seem like a deficit. Yet it is the only truthful answer. Right now, I’m taking the studio back into our home. We aren’t collaborating much as I try to put the space back in order.

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

AB: What about the feedback this work has received? A mother and child working together in the spirit of spontaneous production—this is far from conventional artistic research methodology. I sense you have faced gatekeeping regarding the so-called sanctity of art, both institutionally and interpersonally.

NB: There is the question of artistic merit. I have heard people say: “Why should I be looking at this?” While others might bring up the topic of exploitation, which enrages me and sometimes makes me cry. If there is anyone in the room who genuinely cares about this child, if there is anyone who will suffer the consequences of a lack of love, it is me. And if you’re not feeling protected, if you’re overworked, if you’re exhausted, if it is the wrong time in your menstrual cycle—all these things can add up to the point where you lose your equilibrium. Let’s say it can make it hurt more. In another context, I face gatekeeping from simply saying the word “mom” in an academic setting. There is also gatekeeping concerning the acceptable structure of the nuclear heteronormative family. Further, I have seen critics borrow from emancipatory feminist discourses in ways that deviate from their original intent. In the end, we are speaking about a single mother living below the poverty line, trying to raise her kid during a pandemic with no help. Having this conversation today, I feel the need to foreground that sense of judgment.

AB: I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Cat Attack Collective’s exhibition Walk in the Park at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. From this collaborative, immersive installation, I see two subjects in dialogue, learning and unlearning from one another through artistic experimentation. I can’t help but think that the question of exploitation acts as a form of silencing.

NB: It serves to erase maternal subjectivities from the public forum of art spectatorship. As an MFA student, I immediately knew that the limitations brought on by COVID would interfere with my ability to complete the coursework and develop my studio practice. So, whenever the question of ethics is raised, I wonder why we refuse to consider the opposite point of view? How is this mother going to make new work? She must simultaneously provide care and find an activity that is engaging for her child. Therefore, they are now a collective. If that collective doesn’t exist, she is not making art—that studio practice is erased. What does it mean that we are ignoring this inherited social context of artistic production?

Cat Attack Collective, SS Same Boat, 2022, Ottawa Art Gallery. Image: Justin Wonacott.

AB: Walk in the Park troubles neutral, apolitical readings of maternal caregiving. Through a variety of display strategies, you directly engage the context of your arrival to the gallery space as a mother. To this extent, the exhibition is concerned with means as opposed to ends.

NB: Prior to this exhibition, in 2022 we created an ambitious mixed media work for the final MFA exhibition at the Ottawa Art Gallery titled Abound. In the middle of the gallery sat a towering floor-to-ceiling boat wrapped, draped, and tied in colourful reusable plastics. We called it SS Same Boat. Completing the degree, everyone kept telling me: “Oh, Natalie, you’re fine—we’re all in the same boat.” I often use titles to play against the aesthetic. They allow me to express the inner workings of my discontent, particularly in an acerbic, humorous way. For our current exhibition at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery, we wanted to reuse the materials from SS Same Boat. Tomson said he wanted to make trees—it wasn’t a long brainstorming session. The title Walk in the Park is beautifully straightforward and utterly facetious. And I would like both things to remain true. One does not erase the other. Instead, the premise and the critique are always already held in tension. Representing the complex relationship between a mother and child through an accumulation of art objects—it is a fantastic puzzle.

Today, many mothers are making challenging feminist work about the maternal—we don’t hear about it. 

AB: How might we situate this complexity, art historically speaking?

NB: In Western art history, these interactions have been romanticized by individuals who are not mothers. One concern is the curatorial siloing that occurs. We have been led to back into the corner and be a niche. To call motherhood a niche—this itself is an important piece of evidence that demonstrates how we have internalized such restrictive ideals. Today, many mothers are making challenging feminist work about the maternal—we don’t hear about it. I’m not even sure that we have the eyes for it. I include myself in this category. This observation is partly based on philosopher Julia Kristeva’s essay Stabat Mater (1977). She uses psychoanalytic theory to describe what happens when we look at the artistic motif of the “Madonna and Child,” or any idealized representation of motherhood. For Kristeva, it hardly matters if the viewer is a mother or not—they will identify with the image of the child. And this identification with the child involves a primary narcissism. It is that transportation to a place where I’m nourished, where my needs are met, where I receive care before I had a care in the world. Looking at the “Madonna and Child” is like taking an aesthetic drug. Therefore, when we encounter something like a feminist rendering of the maternal, there is room for profound disappointment, affectively or psychologically. With Walk in the Park, the viewer happens upon a scene that seems ultimately unfulfilling. It is an unsettling landscape of entangled contexts. Here, something rendered historically invisible contends with the problem of what it means to be seen.

You can read Part two of Barbu and Bruvels’ discussion here.

—

Ash Barbu is a writer, curator, and researcher who holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. A recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, they have produced numerous group exhibitions foregrounding the limits of reparative visibility, including Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts (2023). Their recent writings have appeared in publications such as OnCurating, Peripheral Review, and Esse art + opinions. Barbu lectures on queer theory and trans studies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Cat Attack Collective consists of Natalie Bruvels and her son Tomson. They are a multidisciplinary collective working primarily in painting and large-scale installations. Established in 2020, Cat Attack Collective has exhibited at the University of Ottawa, Art Mûr, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and along the Greenboro Pathway as part of Microcosm, the City of Ottawa Public Art Program’s COVID-19 pilot initiative.

Natalie Bruvels holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory, both from the University of Ottawa. She is currently enrolled in the Feminist and Gender Studies PhD program at the University of Ottawa. Bruvels is researching maternal subjectivity in art and visual culture, while advocating for caregiving supports in a university setting. Bruvels has presented the work of Cat Attack Collective at various academic conferences, including the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, Florida. She has subsequently published writing in The Journal of Mother Studies.

Tomson is in grade six and is happy to be back at school in person to spend more time with his friends. He loves dodgeball and has a special affinity for zip-ties as an artistic material. He is the youngest artist to have his work exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery.  

“The Professor’s Desk” by Zinnia Naqvi: Mayworks Festival

Zinnia Naqvi. Before the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk, Inkjet Print, 2023.

Interview by Aysia Tse

“The Professor’s Desk” series by lens-based artist and educator Zinnia Naqvi features archival materials from four specific cases of racial discrimination in or about Canadian universities. Naqvi uses her own student/professor’s desk to frame these cases of systemic racism and considers the impact and legacies of each case, reflecting on the ongoing struggle for racial equity and justice in academic institutions.

As a selected artist for the 2022 Mayworks Labour Arts Catalyst, Zinnia Naqvi worked with the Asian Canadian Labor Alliance (ACLA) with support from OPIRG Toronto to create the photo-based series “The Professor’s Desk.” The series was co-presented with CONTACT Photography Festival at the Whippersnapper Gallery from May 4-31st for the 2023 Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts. Mayworks’ Labour Arts Catalyst is a program that helps to facilitate the collaboration between local labour organizations and artists. As Naqvi describes, her creative and research processes for this project came together organically. After connecting with the two ACLA chapters based in B.C. and Ontario, Naqvi accessed an online archive of digitized materials from ACLA’s 20 years of activism which was her jumping-off point for her research.

I spoke in depth with Naqvi about her process, creative and political considerations for each of the six images in the series, and what she has learned from research into Professor Kin-Yip Chun’s case.

Aysia Tse: Can you discuss your deeply collaborative and multi-focus research process for this series?

Zinnia Naqvi: ACLA hired filmmaker Lokchi Lam to make a video for their 20th anniversary. Lokchi spoke to members and gathered many materials from past events they supported and organized them into five Google Drive folders. One of the folders they made was about instances of anti-Asian racism on Canadian campuses was called “White Fear on Campus.” Lokchi Lam put three events together; Professor Chun’s case, Maclean’s Magazine “Too Asian” article from 2010, and the W5 CTV News segment from 1979, which is what I [made] the project about.

Professor Chun was exploited and wrongfully denied a tenure track position four times at the University of Toronto in a span of 10 years. In 1998, Professor Chun launched a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission for unjust dismissal. His case soon attracted national and international attention.

On the panel, Chris Ramsaroop was one of the founding members of ACLA Ontario, and a student at the time of Professor Chun’s case. He was very actively involved in supporting Professor Chun’s case and there were a lot of student organizers, so he was able to give me insight on the significance of the case from a student perspective. I teach part-time at the University of Toronto and was able to access historical newspaper databases by having institutional access. I found all the Toronto Star articles written about his case specifically and visited their picture collection at the reference library to access images. It was through my own digging that I then found out about OPIRG and the Dr. Chun Resource Library of feminist and critical race theory. Professor Chun donated funds to support the library during his case and it was later renamed after him.

Zinnia Naqvi. After the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: It’s great to hear how bits and pieces of the research came through. OPIRG sounds like a cool grassroots organization whose work relates to what you’re doing. So that was a great collaboration opportunity.

Zinnia Naqvi: Yes, I reached out to them while I was making the project and they generously agreed to support the panel and partner with Mayworks. As a result, we [could] fly Professor Chun to Toronto for the panel. It was interesting looking at this case 20 years after it happened because it isn’t part of the collective memory of the current students.

When I came across this research that Lokchi did, what stuck out to me about Professor Chun’s case was that someone was able to speak out against such a big institution as the University of Toronto and take them to court for racial discrimination. As someone who teaches sessionally in universities and has recently been a student, I have dealt with instances of racism or prejudice in the institutional space. However, to prove that in a court of law and in front of the Ontario Human Rights Commission is significant. There’s a report called the Chun Report that’s a very comprehensive study of the case and all the events that unfolded. It illustrated how toxic the environment was and how blatant the racism was that he faced. I realized that it got to a point in which he had no choice but to take legal action from the school because his treatment was damaging his life and career.

After he reached an initial settlement, he received significantly more discrimination or hostility from other people in the department. Journalists like Margaret Wente wrote very damaging articles in the Globe and Mail, saying that Professor Chun was just trying to get attention. Still today, Professor Chun takes care to not call the University of Toronto racist or any specific person racist, but rather he was talking about systemic racism at a time in which people were not used to hearing that term. That’s another reason why his case felt so significant because it started to change the discourse and language around these issues.

In the Chun report, there is an account stating that at one point Professor Chun was put in an office that had sewage, cockroaches, and mice in it. That’s when the report started to paint a visual picture for me. I started to imagine how experiencing that might look or feel. So that’s the approach I decided to take with this project, to frame it within the space of the office. I’m placing myself in his shoes in a way, but it’s a flex space that’s my imagination of what his desk would be like.

Zinnia Naqvi.What’s Behind the Diversity Numbers?, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: Your desk compositions feature small details including those cockroaches that allude to these important aspects of Professor Chun’s case. What are some of the symbolic considerations you had when curating these pieces? Can you walk me through your thinking about the details you included?

Zinnia Naqvi: With “Before the Settlement,” I wanted it to be this space that’s in between balancing his career as a seismologist, who studies earthquakes and teaches physics. He talked about the personal significance of what this case caused him. He is also a father and there’s a family photo on the desk. He’s an incredible scientist – he received a lot of national funding for his extraordinary research. A lot of that got sidestepped because of the case and the toll that the case took on his life and his career.

The second image is called “After the Settlement.” That’s when I’m imagining the case taking over even more of his life. Things start to get messy and unravel even further.

Then there are also the other images that address different instances from ACLA’s archive. With the images of the controversial 2010 Maclean magazine “Too Asian,” I wanted to show the article and then there was also a book that I have placed on top of it, which was made directly in the aftermath of the article in which many scholars address Anti-Asian racism in universities.

The other image shows the cover of the same Maclean’s magazine, and it was interesting to me to see this image of two students with the Chinese flag that was taken, from what I understand, without their permission. However, the cover image of the magazine is of this very happy-go-lucky white student and the contrast of that was interesting to me.

It also started to make me think about diversity images and when images of diverse people are used for profit. Those images are used to attract students to apply to schools, but then a lot of people who are working or studying within those spaces are not actually supported. This also relates to the other image of the posters; those are current posters that I took from both University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University where I work. It was interesting that I would see a lot of the same posters in both schools. There are a lot of posters about mental health studies, tutoring, and scholarships. It just shows the precarious financial situations of students, especially international students who are brought to these schools and don’t have citizenship status and are not able to work or are limited to how much they can work.

The last image I made is about the W5 CTV News segment from 1979. CTV aired a special that was [essentially] saying that international students were taking the place of Canadian students, especially in medicine and dentistry programs. Then there was a rebuttal by the Chinese Canadian Council, saying how that was factually incorrect and very racist, and there were a lot of protests about that. I have included excerpts from that news segment, articles about the protests, and then again, my school materials and other props to situate these issues in physical space. With these three cases from the past, it was significant to see how the rhetoric was so similar from 1979 to 2010 and continues today.

Zinnia Naqvi. What’s Behind the Diversity Numbers?, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: As a part of the Mayworks Festival programming, you had a public talk with Migrant rights organizer Chris Ramsaroop, moderator Furqan Mohamed and of course Professor Chun about his story and wider conversations about Indigenous, Black, and racialized workers in academic institutions. Can you share more about this discussion or any highlights that came out of that conversation?

Zinnia Naqvi: All the materials I took about Professor Chun’s case were from public archives. But it also felt like at the end of when I read his report, I wasn’t sure where he lived or if he would be interested in the project, but it felt important to me to reach out to him. He originally had said that he would like to be part of a Zoom panel and then later, he said he wanted to come in person. This was significant because it has been 20 years since his case closed and he hadn’t spoken publicly about it for a long time.

What I was interested in with research on Professor Chun’s case is that I wanted to pay homage to his struggle because now, especially in the arts, we’re seeing the flip side of what he had to go through. We’re seeing now that institutions are aware of their lack of diversity and are trying to rectify that by holding targeted BIPOC hires. We’re aware that there’s a problem that’s trying to be resolved. There are still a lot of flaws in that process too as it can be tokenizing. A lot of times people are again invited into the institution, but they’re not supported once they’re there.

But we are at least in a moment where people are openly recognizing that there’s a problem and I do think, we [must] thank people like Professor Chun for making that part of the discourse. He sacrificed a lot to shift the public conscience and I wanted to pay homage to him in this project. Now that we’re in a different moment that still needs a lot of work, but we are trying to make change. We discussed that he wasn’t the only person who had public legal battles with universities in Canada. Many other racialized scholars are still in legal disputes with schools for not being supported or for speaking out against discrimination.

…You’re expected to keep your head down and be grateful that you’ve been given any place at all, even if it’s a precarious one.

Aysia T: I imagine you’ve been thinking about your own role or your own experiences within the institution and with your students. How has that informed your thinking about this project?

Zinnia Naqvi: I was thinking a lot about my own experience, but also about my students. Although I was and am a minority student and faculty, especially in the arts programs that I was in, I was also born here, and I wasn’t an international student. That was one thing I wanted to also be aware of as I was making the work.

We don’t always think of professors as workers because there’s a certain prestige that comes with the academy. That was another thing that stood out about this case. To me it felt like Professor Chun did everything right, he went to these Ivy League schools, and he did everything that you’re supposed to do on paper. Yet you’re expected to keep your head down and be grateful that you’ve been given any place at all, even if it’s a precarious one.

I was thinking about the way that my students, especially the ones who are international students, manage work, worry about grades, and all the pressure that the school puts on them. I’ve had a lot of support from the institutions that I’ve worked at but again, I feel that has come at the expense of others who have come before me.

Aysia T: I think some people dislike when people ask, “What do you dream of?” or “What would be an ideal change?” but I’ve learned to ask it anyway because it’s important. Do you see this work as a call to action for better support for BIPOC artists, students, workers, and staff within academic spaces? What do you hope to see in the future regarding these topics?

Zinnia Naqvi: I’m teaching a digital photography class at U of T right now, and I brought my students to the [Professor’s Desk] exhibition on the first day. It’s funny because it’s a photography class, and I’m making this very political work.

It’s always an awkward space because sometimes as professors, we don’t want to push our own work or our own research too hard. But I would hope that showing this work makes students feel like they can talk about these issues within the space of the school. It’s interesting with Chris Ramsaroop and some of the other student organizers who helped Professor Chun’s case, many of them are working in universities now.

I’m not sure if students today would do a one-week sit-in at the president’s office where they slept there for a week in support of Professor Chun. I just don’t think that we protest in the same way as they did in the nineties. But I think it just shows the impact that students have in these cases. I’m not sure if young people feel like they can make that change [through the idea of collective action]. I think this can be an example that they can. It takes a lot of resources and a lot of confidence to be able to do it. I think it’s also amazing and important to remember. They were able to create collective action and Professor Chun really got the most support from his students. I think talking about these issues and feeling like we can also be peers with our students is important.

You can view all of the images from “The Professor’s Desk” series online on the Mayworks Festival website and read more about OPIRG Toronto’s work on their website.

You can find out more about Professor Chun’s case through the Chun Inquiry.

Check out more of Zinnia Naqvi’s work on her website.

From Women to Everyone: In Conversation with Mulieris Magazine

Muleiris team. From left to right, Greta Langlianni, Chiara Cognigni and Sara Lorusso. Photo by Arianna Angelini.

Interview by Irene Bernardi

Mulieris Magazine was born in 2019 in Italy as an online platform. Greta Langianni and Sara Lorusso, the founder and co-founder, with the collaboration of Chiara Cognigni as graphic designer & Art Director, wanted to create a space for women and non-binary artists who usually find themselves on the margins of the art scene. Mulieris is a Latin word that means ‘of woman’: the magazine started online and has a printed issue in which the team asks women and non-binary artists to work on a specific theme.

This year Mulieris celebrates its fifth birthday—In addition to the print magazine with the fifth open call that has just ended, the opening of Mulieris Studio marked another big step for the community.

Irene Bernardi: I want to start at the beginning: I remember your first print issue Shapes. After all this work and success, what would you like to tell yourself about the past looking back now?

Sara Lorusso: After all the hard work of these years, I would try to motivate us! The project managed to grow and become more important and concrete; for all the times we thought of giving up or did not know where to start, I would like to tell ourselves that with calmness, perseverance, and determination, we came out much more mature and enriched.

Mulieris Magazine. Photo by Sara Lorusso.

How important is having an online platform and a print issue? What strengths and weaknesses have you found in using these two different media?

SL: The online platform made it possible to attract a part of the public that would never have bought a printed magazine. The audience of a print magazine is very specific, and we have always thought that Mulieris is purchased first for the topics and then for the design. In the end, we created two different communities and now they coexist together.

Talking about connection is very important for us, especially since today’s society wants us to be more individualistic: creating connections with others is the last chance to save us.

The Degrees Between Us is the name of the publications’s latest issue about the power of connections, and how far we are from each other. Every person on the planet can be connected to every other person through a five-degree chain: many times, I wonder how healthy these connections are and how important they are for everyday life. How important do you think it is to talk about connections in today’s society?

SL: Talking about connection is very important for us, especially since today’s society wants us to be more individualistic: creating connections with others is the last chance to save us. Mulieris for us was just that, in fact, this issue is about us. We were completely lost at the end of university, it seemed impossible for us to enter the creative world and so we tried to create a space for ourselves and for all creative women who were trying to make their work visible.

Installation view of the exhibition DREAMTIGERS.The Rooom 2023. Photo by Alexa Sganzeria

On the occasion of ArtCity 2023 in Bologna, Mulieris opened the exhibition DREAMTIGERS curated by Laura Rositani in collaboration with the concept studio The Rooom. Six international female artists, Lula Broglio, Alejandra Hernández, Joanne Leah, Sara Lorusso, Sara Scanderebech, Ayomide Tejuoso (Plantation), and The Mosshelter by Marco Cesari, lead the visitors in a sort of “dream world” where plants, humans, and animals mutate and dance together in the secret gardens of unconscious. What do you want to tell with this exhibition?

SL: The works in the exhibition are choreographies of bodies with blurred faces and are stills of animalistic details. They are the tigers mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges in his book Dreamtigers[1], those animals so admired in childhood and only to be encountered in dreams. Dreamtigers is talking about us, we are “tigers” to know. I quote an excerpt from the critical text written by exhibition curator Laura Rositani:

“The works create a succession of visions that immerse us in a fusion of animal, plant, and human worlds. They are a network of cracks to rejoin a sphere of memories. They are ever-changing, vegetal extensions, they are curtains ready to open. Through photography and painting, they look like snapshots of a past event that does not want to give up. They are dreams from which we no longer want to wake up. The surfaces of the works acquire volume and tactility, becoming unreachable to our senses.”

I have a question for Laura Rositani, the curator of DREAMTIGERS. I visited the exhibition twice and it reminds me of some passages from the book The Promises of Monsters by Donna Haraway, a book that is undoubtedly complex, but reasons about the relationship between human and nature. Haraway cites Spivak[2] and explains how nature is “one of those impossible objects that we cannot desire, that we cannot do without and that we cannot in any way possess”[3]: once we wake up from the ‘“dreamtigers” where everything coexists and mutates together, what awaits us in the real world?

Laura Rositani: I’m very interested in your association between the exhibition, this publication, and with Donna Haraway’s studies in general. “Dreamtigers” was meant to be a safe space, unreal at times and suspended in space and time. The nature portrayed is a changing nature, a hybrid one.

The awakening, the return to the real world is probably very disappointing. In reference to what you were quoting: we cannot be without nature, but neither can we possess it. Nature is not an essence, a treasure, a resource, a womb, a tabula rasa. Nature cannot be grasped in its totality, nor can its boundaries be established. Let’s consider what it is currently happening in Italy with continuous climate emergencies.

Perhaps the only way is precisely what Haraway points us to: to think of ourselves as virtual, that is, able to do things together.

Orchid Flowers. Artwork by Sara Lorusso.Installation view of the exhibition DREAMTIGERS.The Rooom 2023. Courtesy of Alexa Sganzeria and the artist.

In DREAMTIGERS, a few of your photos are also included in your first photo book As a Flower published by Witty Books. Specifically, the picture of the orchid, a beautiful flower that is usually fragile. In the image, the flower definitely refers to a vulva, but with an almost punk and rebellious hint, with these piercings hanging from the petals. Could the main picture represent the mission of Mulieris and the studio?

SL: I usually say that this photograph is a self-portrait of me in 2017 when I took it. When I took that photo, I did not yet know that I suffered from chronic pelvic pain and I had not yet come out as a queer person; this made me smile a lot because I knew practically nothing about myself but now, looking back at that photograph, things appear clear and simple to me. I like to find new significance to my photographs and associating this picture in particular with Mulieris and our mission as a project could be very powerful.

The last question is about the future of Mulieris: do you have any new projects on the horizon?

SL: There are many projects planned, the most imminent of which is the release of the new issue and the Launch Party on 23th of June in Milan. We are also organizing a new exhibition in collaboration with an art gallery in 2024!


You can find more about Mulieris Magazine and Studio Mulieris on their website and you can pre-order the new issue on Frabs Magazines.

View more of Sara Lorusso’s work on her website and Instagram, and her book As a Flower.

[1] Borges L. Jorge, Dreamtigers, translation by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, illustrated by Antonio Frasconi, Texas Pan American Series, 1964.

[2] Theory by Gayatri Spivak, american philosopher of Bengali origin. Active in the fields of postcolonialism, feminism, literary theory and gender studies.

[3] Haraway D., The promise of monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others, Routledge, 1992, pg 37.