Category: Uncategorized | Page 4

Sand after sand, the oyster will cry: Anatomy of an Oyster by Rita Puig-Serra

Rita Puig-Serra. Anatomy of an Oyster, 2023. Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.

By Irene Bernardi

“Mother-of-pearl” is one of the most precious and rare types of pearls.

The Italian writer and poet Franco Buffoni crafted a unique poem to tell the story of how a grain of sand becomes this incredible and luminous pearl:

[…]
If you photograph the sand and then magnify it

To three hundred times

Each grain reveals itself as unique:

One looks like Saturn without rings,

Another is Venus, then Mars with colors,

Jupiter that stays under the fingernail

And Uranus that falls

Into the right oyster

And makes it cry

Becomes in a hundred years

Mother’s pearl.^[1]

Into the poetic and scientific imagination of the Italian writer, a small and insignificant grain of sand — after a long journey through the planets of our solar system — accidentally slips inside an oyster. This lucky encounter will produce a small but precious pearl that “[…] becomes, in a hundred years, Mother’s pearl.” Anatomy of an Oyster — the solo show by Catalan artist Rita Puig-Serra — is a journey inside the artist’s consciousness that, through the metaphor of analyzing an oyster, tells the story of her personal experience with family abuse.

Rita Puig-Serra. Installation view of the exhibition *Anatomy of an Oyster*, 2024, PhMuseum Lab, Bologna
Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.

Walking inside the small space of PhMuseum Lab in Bologna, are some of the photographs realized by the artist creating a sort of labyrinth, recreating an old installation made by the Italo-Brasilian architect Lina Bo Bardi for the Museum of Art in Sāo Paulo in 1970^[2].

The artworks of Puig-Serra as the design of Bo Bardi are placed in clear glass panels, attached to concrete blocks: the exhibition’s layout fades, letting the visitor choose the order in which to see the works. The concrete blocks are as heavy as the words that the artist wants to tell to an absent mother during her childhood. That small insidious grain slowly takes shape and grows, pressing inside the oyster, much like the artist’s thoughts, words, and desires, which, as she grows, can no longer ignore the pearl of fears that have been with her since childhood.

Emerging from the labyrinth, a series of photographs are lined on the wall. Some depict the lengthy process of extracting mother-of-pearl, while others showcase the artist’s childhood from her archive, complete with phrases and memories. This is the journey of Puig-Serra inside the process to extract her deep memory of the abuses.

“The oyster will produce layers of nacre around the nucleus.”

This delicate narrative unfolds like a puzzle of memories: analog photographs from her childhood are interwoven with descriptions of the anatomy of an oyster and memories. The ghosts of her family are both visible and hidden within this narrative, such as old photos in which the artist shows some details of the person who abused her. Isolated on one side of the exhibition space is a letter recreated by the artist, written to her best friend, and then burned in a park. Injustices, abuses, and silences experienced are kept inside a small oyster on the sea floor for years when finally the mother-of-pearl sees the light of truth.

How small and insignificant can a grain of sand be compared to a planet? What are the chances that this grain can transform into mother-of-pearl? Anatomy of an Oyster gathers all these seemingly insignificant childhood events of Rita Puig-Serra to explore pain and abuse. It’s a self-analysis that takes shape in the anatomy of an oyster, which is studied, analyzed, photographed, and assimilated, only to be removed—just like the memories of the Catalan artist.

Rita Puig-Serra (Spain, 1985) is a photographer living in Barcelona. After a humanistic education and a Master’s degree in comparative literature, she studied graphic design and photography.

The project Anatomy of an Oyster was released by Witty Books in 2023. The exhibition is part of PhMuseum International Photo Festival place from 12 to 15 September 2024 in Bologna, Italy.

The PhMuseum Lab will be open 4pm-7pm during the Festival days in Via Paolo Fabbri 10/2a.

For more information about PhMuseum International Photo Festival, visit their website and Instagram.

For more information about Rita Puig-Serra and her exhibition, visit her website and Instagram.

^[1] trad. from Franco Buffoni, Betelgeuse e altre poesie scientifiche, 2021, Mondadori, Milano

^[2] Moffit E., How Lina Bo Bardi Built An Art World Without Walls, 14/04/2020, www.frieze.com

Surveillance Eyes: In Conversation with Harley Morman

Don’t Dream It, Be It

Harley Morman

Southern Alberta Art Gallery

May 11 – June 22, 2024

Interview by Migueltzinta Solís

There’s something about Harley Morman’s work that makes you want to sink your teeth into it. I’ve been close friends with Harley for seven years – in the good times and the bad – and I always look forward to being transported to the colorful, gummy world that is his trans, queer creative practice. We are at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) during Lethbridge Pride, a few hours after riding together in the parade as part of our local queerdo bicycle club. After what I felt were too many cheering children, it feels good to bask in the simmering glow of plastic, rubber, and knitted objects that comprise Harley Morman’s solo exhibition, Don’t Dream It, Be It.

The exhibition space, once a library, is transformed by an overlay of trans-metaphysical subliminality. Coloured tape crisscrosses the hardwood floor, mirrors hang from above on bright plastic chains, nearly life-size Perler bead self-portraits stand sentinel, and lenticular images wiggle and wink as you move through the room. A knitted rope sways from the ceiling, delightful yet foreboding, ending in a sprinkling of rainbow aquarium gravel. A full wall is dedicated to an enigmatic map made from strips of tape which, upon scrutiny, reveals itself to be a play diagram for the exhibition space. At the end of the room, behind the hanging mirrors, a scoreboard with a clock, and a rainbow collage of plastic figurines surveil the visitor. Inhabiting the space, one may feel that a game is in play, and one, in their queerness, might feel a looming sense of anxiety about what the game is, what the rules are, and whether they are getting it “right” or not.

Migueltzinta Solís (MS): Hi, Harley. (laughs)

Harley Morman (HM): Hi, Miguel. (giggles)

MS: My first question is, who are the different Harleys in this show?

HM: There are a lot of different Harleys here. There’s the Harley that is me, that’s my body…

MS: That I’m talking to.

HM: Yes! That is speaking. There’s also a ton of different Harleys. The most literal Harley is the work that is called Megan number 3: Harley. It makes good narrative sense to say it was the last thing I finished for the exhibition. There are three Perler bead works in this show. Each one represents me at a different stage of my transition, which wasn’t the plan at first.

When I made the first Megan, the one that looks like it’s diving for a clock, it’s trying to catch something. That Megan was made during my MFA, for a specific project that was essentially me bouncing around the volleyball or balloon-like heads of teachers who I had worked with during my MFA. I had worked with Perler beads before, and at the time when I made that Megan, in 2016, it represented a new direction in terms of the size and complexity of the pieces in terms of the way I was using and interpreting colour information. I wanted to make more of them.

The second one is from 2019. That was made specifically for the Dunlop Art Gallery in an exhibition of queer art on the prairies. Each one that I make of these gets bigger and more complicated in terms of the pattern. The third one took a long time, much longer than they normally do, even though I’ve gotten quick at it. Although I’m slower than I might have been before 2017 just because of the plaid jacket I’m wearing in the work.

MS: I like this idea of increasing complexity over multiple iterations or replications of Harley. First, I relate to the complexity of embodiment across these different replications of self. In simpler language you could say, “the complexity of gender,” but because of the temporal and kinetic questions here, it’s more than just about gender, which is why I love this work. I’m curious to hear you say more about the kinetic movements or actions that the figures are doing.

HM: Each of the figures represents an evolution of complexity of how I’m working with material. But in terms of the gestures that each of the figures is doing: each one plays off the others but could be understood as – I don’t want to use the word “evolution” – but is a direct response to the others. In the first one, I’m in a diving action pose because originally, I wanted to make it look like I was attempting to catch the heads that were coming at me, that were bouncing all over the place. They were up high and coming at the viewer and at the “me” that was on the wall. I wanted to make it look like that figure was an approximate life-size figure actively interacting with things. But if you look at my pose, the diving pose, it’s very much a responsive pose. I have my hands together, clasped with my wrists flattened, in the way that I [was] taught that you’re supposed to hit a volleyball. I never really knew how to hit a volleyball. It’s watching: that figure is looking up towards stuff but is very much in a ready pose but not in a “go” pose yet.

In the second one, where my hands are up, I was imagining something akin to a volleyball serve– there’s no reason that I’m using volleyball as a metaphor here aside from the fact that it was a sport that as a girl in the Midwest, I was often called upon to do in gym class. It was also a thing that because of my vision problems, I am hopeless at it and always have been. I’m just incapable of seeing things that come at me fast. Anyway, I was thinking of the jumping up action and reaching for something, so it looks a little bit more active. And here in this exhibition, it’s reaching up towards an alarm clock that’s sitting at the top of the wall.

In this third one, I wasn’t sure if it would quite “go” because it’s not an indoor sport: I’m riding a bicycle. The bicycle is rendered photographically except for the outline of the bike, which is in flat colors that are similar colors to the wall. And it’s away from the others. The other two on either side of the scoreboard are a symmetrical set. But this is something else, it’s away and it’s very much watching what’s happening.

MS: I love this hypothetical engagement with sport. (laughs)

HM: It is very much just an imaginary sport. The lines on the floor seem to be fooling people, and that’s what they’re supposed to do, but they’re not based on any sort of official diagram. I’m looking at the scoreboard with the mirrors, and there is a “basketball key,” a word that I only knew when I said that I wanted to make one. I think sport and activity in this show is not a literal reference to actual practices, it’s more a field on which actors play.

MS: As a gay villain, I, of course, love the language of “fooling people.” I love the queer permission you’ve given yourself to define the space into an imaginary sports field.

HM: Most of the time, a lot of the references really core to this show are not visible. And I don’t expect them to be and it’s not necessary. I wanted it to look like a gym. When I was in elementary school, the only reason I would participate in sports activities was when I was forced to. I was always sitting to the side and crafting. No matter where we were, whether we were indoors or outdoors, I was always finger knitting.

MS: Is that what this is over here?

HM: Yeah. Kind of. It’s not literally the finger knitting that I made long ago. So, the finger knitting, you’re using your fingers as the pegs or needles so there’s only four of them. It ends up making super thin and loose rope that doesn’t have a really good use.

MS: In looking at this long rope of finger knitting that attaches to the ceiling with a carabiner and ends on the floor in a pool of…is that aquarium gravel?

HM: It’s aquarium gravel, some plastic gems, and a few beads. I wanted something to be on the ground. I wanted for this knit object to look at least as threatening as the original object felt to me. The aquarium gravel is there as an uncomfortable fall, instead of there being a cushy mat underneath. If you attempted to climb this, you’d fall onto an uncomfortable surface that would be super jabby.

MS: That would probably stick to your skin and leave those little indents.

HM: [The gravel] is its own security since it makes so much noise if you step on it. You can hear it, easily, outside of the gallery.

MS: I saw the diagram of the space on the wall, and the thing that made me realize that it was a diagram of the space – a bird’s eye view of the space – was the gravel there.

HM: The diagram is so provisional and messy looking; I don’t expect people to necessarily know what it’s supposed to be. Because my work tends to be so intricately thought out and polished, the way that this drawing came together was kind of uncomfortable. It’s weird to say that fully intuitive making can be uncomfortable, but it is. When I saw the court lines on the floor, they gave me permission to have the drawing on the wall be as wacky as I wanted it to be. I used a level to make the blue and pink lines on the background, but everything else was done by eye. When I look at it, in one sense it’s kind of a picture of how I’m dizzy, because it’s not straight or even kind of straight in a typical way. The whole thing is a bit rotated in exactly the way things are spinning for me all the time.

…The drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”

MS: I feel like this is a map of how you move as well. I can visualize you moving in this set of blue lines much more easily than I can imagine myself. It represents you offering your own perspective and experience of a space and how you move through it.

HM: I love that. The lines did have a logic when I was making them. I forget what that was, and I don’t think it’s important. The important thing was some of them were meant to represent actual physical trajectories and others, sidelines, looking back and forth.

MS: You described this piece as important as well as uncomfortable.

HM: That is important, oh my gosh. I mean the drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”

MS: I feel like there’s something in here about the difference between the hypothetical and embodied experience, and how it relates to understanding “the rules of the world.”

HM: A lot of my past work has been concerned with the rules and conventions of gallery spaces and institutional spaces. I think part of what I have a hard time articulating is just the fact these are good visual metaphors for the difference between the smooth and the striated.

The Scoreboard is one of the things that I have shown before. It was in the iteration of the show that was at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). When it was at the AGA, it was much more prominent because of the lighting, and the color of the walls, and the way the space was set up in general. It was essentially the focus of the entire room and it’s not necessarily that prominent here. It reads not as the most important thing that you see upon entering but just as one of many. The Scoreboard was made to only be legible when you stand inside the arc of the mirrors. If you look in a mirror, you could see not only yourself but also the scoreboard and things reflected the right way round. The clock is running the right way in the reflection, you can read the mirrored letters that are on The Scoreboard.

I love when people take selfies in the reflection, so that things are the right way around. Because generally The Scoreboard is incredibly ambiguous – it is not, and I don’t want it to be, apparent what it’s tracking. I think of it actively, and I know it doesn’t necessarily read like this directly because on one level it is very colorful and full of glittery beads and it’s shiny. But I think of it as a threatening piece, in the same way I think of gross, dirty climbing things as also being very threatening just by their existence. It’s just the idea that you might be tracked or that something about your interaction will be seen and could be accounted for.

MS: It’s a looming metric.

HM: Yeah, exactly! I mean in terms of transness, which was obviously a huge thing when I was making it back in 2021, it’s like competition as a bodily metaphor, but also a representation of tracking in terms of the timelines of change, of transition, and of growth and change in general.

MS: I think we both know that within trans experience and trans societies, there is a weird competitiveness. Whose transition is the best, who’s doing it right.

HM: It’s one of the things everyone knows, and nobody likes, but also you end up participating in it. I often find myself, or parts of my brain, echoing this hypercompetitive [sense]…I don’t think I necessarily have good things to say about that. It’s like tracking bad behaviour, bad feelings in general. This is very different from the affect that I think this show has for most people. I want it to, when you really think about it or look at it in the right way, look not happy but kind of threatening and scary.

MS: I definitely see it as sinister. A lot of people are like, “It’s playful”, “It’s a game”, “It’s a fun thing,” and “Kids will love it.”

HM: Yeah, and it is, and kids do absolutely love it. And I love that they love it, but also that’s only one reading of it and it’s not the most interesting reading of it.

MS: I think it’s interesting in the context of recent trans history, how we are from the late 90s, early 2000s, certainly in terms of FTMs and trans men, which is language that isn’t even cool anymore. We had Buck Angel and Chaz Bono and there were these metrics of passing and who had the most masculinization result. And then, of course, more recently there has been a shift away from that but now we have metrics of who has the better politics. It’s like whose is the best gender.

HM: But the gender isn’t necessarily based on hairiness. The gender is like a different, less physical aesthetic, but a politicized aesthetic.

MS: Hypothetical gender. Who has the most evolved gender and self-contextualization.

HM: Oh my god.

MS: Like the metric is different but there’s still a metric, but what even is it?

HM: In a way a person could think of it as being worse because it’s wider, and there are so many more expectations because transition is very much hypervisible at the moment, and because it’s so visible, the one who is undergoing transition is accountable to an even wider group of people.

As I’m standing over here, through the arc of the mirrors I’m looking at the lenticulars over there and thinking about how the stripes look like bars in a way. Some of them, not all of them.

MS: Because my work has been about trans self-imaging, I’m curious about the way the mirror’s been working in here and the way time is part of that. Because there doesn’t seem to be mirrors without clocks in here.

HM: I like the mirrors with the references to time because of how it implicates a person and their body at a specific moment. It’s hard to not realize that you’re a viewer, which I insist on hitting people over the head with. I think there are considerably less mirrors in this show than there are in most of my shows. What are they reflecting? It’s kind of like going back in time, in a way. I feel like it’s important to have mirrors with the lenticular stuff because they do a weird thing with simultaneity and travel.

I’ve heard from some trans people who come into the show and see the lenticulars, that they make them feel weirded out and uncomfortable. Because I started transitioning so late and had already been practicing for years, it was not even a thought that I could or might want to be secretive about it. It seems like the obvious thing to do for me at this point in my life and career, to be completely fine with having my old photos interlaced.

MS: Transness has different generations that are not necessarily attached to chronological time. How I feel you and I are of a similar trans generation even though you started your transition later in life than I did, and our transitions happened within distinct decades of trans history and discourse. And it’s very different than the other generations that are simultaneously unfolding.

HM: Yeah, that makes sense in terms of me because you’re always teasing me by saying how my gender is very anachronistic like my gender is a time period. I’m kind of curious about how my students might interpret the lenticulars. I hope that at least some of them might think that this was naughty. (laughs) Like it was somehow transgressive to show them blending into each other instead of a binary on/off situation.

MS: I certainly find these works to be very transgressive. As a completely immersive space, I sense the question, “Am I doing it right?”, on a societal level. “Is this how it’s done?”

HM: Yes, that exact thing. That nebulous sense of anxiety about “Am I being watched?” and “Is this okay?” is really important.

MS: “Is this how you play the game?” “Am I winning?” “Is this scoring?”

HM: (laughs) Yeah. The fact that it’s in a gallery, in an art space considered in relation to not trans but art communities, which are their own kind of weird hyper-competitiveness.

MS: To go back to lenticulars, and unease, I would say that in their layered-ness, discomfort, and unsettling-ness, they express the embodied experience, that is both uncomfortable and really rich, of being a person stretched across different points of time, mapped through gender pinpoints, kind of like that map over there.

HM: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that kind of temporal experience of aging and of thinking about yourself…because I think, or hope, everyone would probably think or feel this like they’ve been several different people since they were that age. In the past 25 years, I’ve been a bunch of different people. Some are probably a lot more important than technically whichever gender I might be perceived as. I feel like aside from transness, the depiction of aging might be relatable more generally.

This little best girl and best boy (referring to stickers on the gallery wall display) is one of my favorite things in the show. It’s just one of the scholastic stickers and both exist as separate stickers and all I did was just put them together and they worked perfectly. I feel like the scholastic stickers in general are rich in terms of references and material and lend themselves to turning into lenticulars. This cluster wall doesn’t get a lot of attention, but one of things that I like is the big clock. This wall – the eyes that are at the important points, the twelve, the three and the six, etc, are all eyes from stickers. This wall has just a bunch of other references to surveillance and stuff.

MS: Metrics of performance and surveillance. Can we just touch on that? (Referring to the front page of a notebook with handwriting displayed on wall.)

HS: Yeah, that’s an actual page from a notebook because I said I’m a keeper, I do have all the paperwork I’ve produced throughout school and after that because I keep everything. I feel really justified in it because it’s coming in handy, repeatedly.

MS: Given that the paper refers to Megan’s rules, have you been following Megan’s rules?

HM: I can’t remember what Megan’s rules are. “This is a notebook, my notebook. Don’t bother it or you’ll have to answer to me.” I think that I’ve totally virtually destroyed Megan’s notebook by removing the cover.

MS: “P.S. Have fun”, is that what it says at the bottom?

HM: I think it probably does.

MS: Was there more you wanted to say about this wall?

HM: No, I just wanted to say, “Surveillance eyes!” (Points at lenticulars of eyes.) I just wanted to point them out.

MS: Transness continues to be so surveilled in terms of policy, particularly in Albertan trans and queer school and health policy right now. I think this show expresses the metaphysical experience of that kind of surveillance that is part of trans experience.

HM: Like what are the psychic implications of surveillance that trans people put themselves under before transitioning, or just in general, because of gender feelings.

MS: Yeah totally, think about in medical transition when you go on hormones, you have to do the experimental dose and you self-surveil as part of that. There’s an expectation to self-surveil.

HM: Yeah, it’s a requirement.

For more of Harley’s dizzy delights, follow him on IG: @Harley_Morman.
For more queerdo adventures that include Harley & Migueltzinta, visit his website here.

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.

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 8^th 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.

Forming Information: IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour

Aileen Bahmanipour. *IT IS MEANT TO BE READ.* Installation shot. Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of Dennis Ha. 2023.

March 31 to June 3, 2023

BAF Gallery, Vancouver, BC

By Kiran Dhaliwal

Aileen Bahmanipour’s uncanny installation and works with paper question the regulation of and access to information through its destruction. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ features revisited and new works by the Iranian-Canadian visual artist from her winter residency at the Burrard Arts Foundation. Bahmanipour’s practice is informed by her lived experience with censorship in Iran. Her work also centers the exploration of contemporary forms of Iconoclasm which she defines as “not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it.”

The gallery is transformed into a quasi-bureaucratic space with diagrammatic imagery, paper hanging on the walls, and a filing cabinet in the center. Instead of answers and information, Bahmanipour’s manipulation of each piece reveals tensions and misgivings in the supposed transparency of constitutional law and archival systems. In turn, this prompts viewers to remedy their curiosities beyond the gallery space and, like the title suggests, encourages active interpretation.

When clarity is lacking, this creates a level of opacity obfuscating the connection between a body and language.

When it comes to information meant to be accessible and understood by the public, things like government documents and constitutions often feel like they’re written in a different language. When clarity is lacking, this creates a level of opacity obfuscating the connection between a body and language. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ (2022) is a manifestation of this connection where Bahmanipour reimagines language through the exploration of her own body in the process of engaging with an English translation of The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This vaguely worded document contains articles regulating and restricting the circulation of information to the Iranian people. For those trying to navigate what’s legal or not (especially when the consequences are severe), the ambiguity plays in favour of the state as the public reaction to such dubiety can present itself as self-censorship. These conditions create cautious, fearful citizens who do not want to test the law, afraid that acting outside of the status quo may land them in prison or worse.

*IT IS MEANT TO BE READ* by Aileen Bahmanipour installation shot, Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

This series occupies three of the four walls and takes on two approaches. In the first approach, handmade letter-size sheets of paper are embedded on both sides with single lines cut from the document. The lights of the gallery glow through the sheets that extend outwards making both sides visible to the viewer. Bahmanipour’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the Iranian Constitution is her method of finding new ways to connect to the language and attempt to understand it. The single lines are folded into a knot and then arranged onto the paper like concrete poetry, creating a new method of connection and meaning to the language.

The other two walls are mounted with fifty-five pages of handmade paper that, while still wet, Bahmanipour placed over her keyboard as she typed the constitution. The organic, delicate quality of the paper creates a sense of softness, making the depressions and punctures left by her typing fingertips on the lower half of the sheet somewhat violent. The sheets are affixed side by side to the wall with a single nail against a painted strip of pale umber that runs along the two walls. Described as “cryptic” in the exhibition write-up, this series is arguably the clearest embodiment of Bahmanipour’s efforts to understand and reimagine the text and language. The perforations made in the paper can be seen as indices of her body as she converts dysfunctional language into material form.

Iconoclasm doesn’t just refer to the destruction of religious icons, images, and monuments, but symbols of a political or ideological cause as well. Bahmanipour’s interest and exploration of contemporary forms of Iconoclasm is displayed in this work. She also gives the ground of the image—which historically has been suppressed and regarded as merely a surface that holds the image—a new language, making it more visible and a part of the image. She uses the iconoclastic gesture of an image-breaker or, as she describes in her statement, “the person who doesn’t have a language of her own but by deconstructing the already established language tries to create new meanings to make sense of reality and create meaning from apparently disparate elements.”

The sculptural installation, Filing Cabinet (2017-2023) is a transparent, self-destructive archive system. Again, Bahmanipour interrogates the supposed transparency of archival systems by removing the sides of the filing cabinet to make the insides visible. Viewers are encouraged to open and look through the drawers. Three of which contain clear folders with printed and layered diagrammatic imagery. As if the cabinet was dreaming about the folders that sit inside of it, a dream bubble in the form of a large painted roll of acetate reaches up and wraps itself around the duct above.

On the floor between the two is plastic tubing that is connected to a dosing engine in the bottom cabinet drawer. The engine administers a permanent, acidic ink that travels through the tubes and pools onto the painted pile of acetate and given its nature, will ruin the intricate illustrations. When an archival system is meant to preserve and accumulate information, Bahmanipour gives us an anti-archival, self-destructive system that eats away at itself. No matter how clear the folders and acetate are or how many panels are taken off the filing cabinet, what stands between me and this installation is a curious space worth questioning.

At a time when we are constantly bombarded by information and falling into algorithmic feedback loops on social media, IT IS MEANT TO BE READ left me feeling slightly disoriented and walking away wanting to know more. Bahmanipour’s manipulation of the selected source materials raises questions about the systems and flow of information meant for the public. By deconstructing and reconstructing the image, her work interrogates archaic, systematic constructions of representation and presumed objectivity with an alternate visual form. Despite the opacity of their façade, viewers are invited to interact with the materials that promise transparency and are meant to explain how systems function. Instead of searching for answers in documents that falsely promise this transparency, the exhibition encourages using our confusion or restriction of information as a catalyst to create alternative methods of understanding.

This review is featured in our third print issue themed on Censorship found here.

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.

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.

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?

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.

A Feminist Curating Gaze with Artierranti

Deconstruction of the Patriarchal Art World

Artierranti team. Left to right, Laura Brambilla and Giorgia Casadei.

By Irene Bernardi

ARTIERRANTI is a cultural association born in 2013 based in Bologna, Italy. The main intention of their project is the concept of curation as the primary form of mediation. Each project stems from a close collaboration with the artists and is defined as a unique event. The research is focused on finding amplifiers for the work and the poetics through curating solo exhibitions and seeking collaborations for each artist with experts, organizations, and institutions.

Today Laura Brambilla and Giorgia Casadei are leading the project, which finds “home” at Officina Artierranti, located in the city center of Bologna.

You define yourself as a “Feminist and Woman cultural association.” How do you prioritize feminist values in art and curating within your exhibitions and workshops? Especially today where most curatorial and art positions are held by men!

In 2022, when we dedicated ourselves to redesigning our website, we decided to include the description “a female and feminist association” in our presentation. This is a phrase that we might have found somewhat daring in the past, but today, we have chosen to formally declare our stance, in line with what the art world demands. I always think of Carla Lonzi, an art critic and activist, who wrote in Autoritratto: “When I learned that feminism existed, I didn’t even bother to find out what it was, I am a woman, I do feminism.”^[1]

Perhaps the same has happened to us. Naturally, our research gravitated towards feminism, opting not only to give more space to female artists but also to promote works that would foster debate, to continue questioning the role we have played throughout history and the space we wish to claim today.

An important topic in your curatorial footprint, is the synergy with spaces where you decide to have an exhibition: not a simple “white cube” but places where we can see a strong relationship with the artist, poetics, and artworks. What criteria do you use when selecting unconventional locations for art exhibitions? Can you give some examples from past exhibitions or projects?

Initially, the choice to be nomadic was determined by our lack of a stable location. When we founded Artierranti in 2013, we were still students at the Academy of Fine Arts, quite uncertain about our future, and it seemed best not to commit to managing a space we would struggle to maintain. For this reason, Giorgia and I envisioned a nomadic association, capable of moving and transforming in response to the artist and the project. This curatorial approach stood in stark contrast to the white cube, which tends to eliminate any form of contamination, a thought that believed (and still believes) that every artist and every poetic requires a proper place of resonance.

This, of course, had direct consequences such as the choice to hold only solo exhibitions, besides the fact that, from a logistical standpoint, moving always to unconventional places not intended for exhibitions imposed many more limitations in terms of setup. Over the years, we have searched for places that were increasingly consistent with our research project, even from a content perspective. Consider, for example, what we did with Guido Volpi at the Luigi Fantini Museum of Speleology or, for instance, with Susana Ljuljanovic at the Cassero – Gender Identity Documentation Center in Bologna. In these projects, not only did the location become an integral part of the research, but it also served as a code for understanding the project.

Susana Ljuljanovic, *Song of Invisible Garden,* 2022. Cassero – Gender Identity Documentation Center, Bologna. Courtesy of Eleonora Conti and the artist.

How do you reconcile reflecting on past experiences and planning future projects inside and outside Officina Artierranti?

In 2016, we decided to establish a physical headquarters for the Association. This idea stemmed from the fact that our wandering made it difficult to identify and recognize Artierranti. We wanted to showcase what we had been able to build in the early years by creating a hub where we could meet artists, construct, and store all the staging supports created by Giorgia, and also collect artworks donated by artists who had collaborated with us. Thus, Officina Artierranti was born with the dual soul of an archive and a workshop, facilitated by the presence of a street-level floor with a display window and a basement. In constructing this new phase, we set a rule for ourselves: Officina Artierranti would never become an exclusive exhibition venue, but we would continue to seek other places to set up exhibitions to create increasingly conceptual connections with the city. Collaborating with various local entities has allowed us to create solid relationships that persist.

Adele Dipasquale, *I swallowed a Butterfly,* 2024. Educational Department, MAMbo Museum of Modern Art of Bologna. Courtesy of Artierranti and the artist.

I would like to talk about the latest exhibition at ART CITY 2024 in Bologna, I SWALLOWED A BUTTERFLY, a solo exhibition by Italian artist Adele Dipasquale. The exhibition focused on the role of sound as a cultural and patriarchal tool. How does this concept contribute to the exploration and subversion of patriarchal power dynamics within Dipasquale’s works?

Meeting and delving into Adele’s work was extremely interesting. When we [encountered] their videos, we were deeply fascinated by the imagery. But each image is a gateway to a complex universe of references to history, mythology, and literature that show how the education we receive from early childhood is fundamentally patriarchal. In Adele’s work, the most apparent trait of this female subordination is addressed through sound: the female protagonist decides to emit all possible sounds, including the guttural and monstrous ones attributed from Aristotle onwards to the female gender, thus losing her own voice. In this way, achieving a state of silence becomes an exercise in freedom.

What I have seen as a “red thread” among many of the recent exhibitions is how the feminine tries to regain the freedom that has been taken away from it, partly because of the many superstitions and attributions throughout history.

Certainly, we deliberately chose to open Adele Dipasquale‘s curatorial text with a quote from the essayist Nicoletta Polla Mattiot, which says, “There is no conviction more deeply rooted than the cliché.”^[2] Reflecting on the past two years of work, I realize that we have traversed different worlds and cultures, from Greek mythology to Mexican mythology before and after Spanish colonization. We have encountered powerful female figures, both real and imaginary, who, precisely because of their great power, have been gradually forced to inhabit increasingly small and controlled spaces, eventually becoming figures of the abyss, often monstrous and horrific. In this way, in Noemi Mirata‘s exhibition, the myth of Proserpina encountered Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands,”^[3] finding strong correspondence with the goddess Coatlicue: two women who inhabit the borderlands and contain within themselves the power of life and the power of death.

Noemi Mirata, *PROSERPERE. Indicativo presente,* 2023. Offina Artierranti, Via Sant’Isaia 56/A, Bologna. Courtesy of Eleonora Conti and the artist.

What advice would you give to someone who is taking their first steps into the world of curation?

We are well aware that working in the arts, especially in Italy, means struggling. Often, we have chosen to self-fund our projects rather than spending unpaid work hours trying to access some form of funding, so the best advice we can give is to always have fun first and foremost. Finding pleasure in one’s research is crucial in order to offer quality work. Another important aspect is to always strive to build a relationship of equality and ongoing exchange with artists, which is one of the most interesting aspects of our work. Finally, I believe that today it is essential to choose how to position oneself and consequently propose exhibitions that are consistent with one’s research line, without running the risk of becoming overly didactic.

Can we have a little preview about your next project?

We are currently following several projects. First, we would like to conclude the trilogy about gender/boundary with a final exhibition by a female artist. At the same time, we are planning the next exhibition to be proposed within Art City Bologna 2025. Additionally, for some time we have been thinking about a much broader project dedicated to the relationship between women and nature, involving various artists who have collaborated with us over the years. In this case, we would like to somewhat disrupt our patterns, perhaps thinking as a curatorial collective…however, at the moment we do not want to reveal too much!

You can find more information about Artierranti on their Instagram or Facebook.

^[1] Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto. Accardi, Alviani, Castellani, Consagra, Fabro, Fontana, Kounellis, Nigro, Paolini, Pascali, Rotella, Scarpitta, Turcato, Twombly, Abscondita, Milano, 2021

^[2] Nicoletta Polla Mattiot is an Italian essayist and journalist.

^[3] Gloria Anzaldúa was an American sociologist and writer of Chicana, feminist, and cultural theory.

Reimagining the Gaps: Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts

Jackman Humanities Institute

September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024

Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Lan “Florence” Yee, Kama La Mackerel, Jordan King, and Kasra Jalilipour

Curated by Dallas Fellini

Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, *The Pink Pegboard* from Tape Condition: degraded (2016), 2023. Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

By Adi Berardini

I walk into what looks like a 1990s hotel lobby with a black, brown, and weathered gold interior filled with house plants. I walk determinedly to the elevators to head up to the tenth floor of the Jackman Humanities Institute – an interdisciplinary building part of the University of Toronto. In many ways, an exhibition within meeting rooms seems well-suited to queer the space of (potentially boring) meetings. The exhibition Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts, curated by Dallas Fellini, features artists Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Lan “Florence” Yee, Kama La Mackerel, Jordan King, and Kasra Jalilipour. The show addresses how the colonial archive has omitted queer and trans works from its depths while also being a method of control and surveillance of LGBTQ2S+ artists.

Exiting the elevator, I see a stark white office space with a reception desk. Walking down the hall to the main exhibition space, the installation by Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney immediately stands out. Among a pink wall with perforated holes, there are items such as pink triangle archival buttons saying, “No more shit” and a rendered drawing of the buttons, a bag of gloves, a paddle, drawings of VHS tapes and instructions for their care, and a megaphone with fabric strips forming the shape of a pop-pom. Tools hang below a sign that says “LESBIANS invented the internet” in green text. There’s a printout of the Body Politic issue featuring an essay by Chris Bearchell about lesbian porn.

Created as part of a residency at the ArQuives, Meyer and McKinney address pro-porn versus anti-porn feminism, a long-standing discussion within feminist circles. Some may question if lesbian porn should be kept in archives when lesbian identity has been so sexualized. However, capturing DIY lesbian porn and desire is an important aspect of an archive and snapshot in time. The installation takes a more sex-positive approach and parallels the care for VHS tapes with kinky sex practices. The installation sparks a discussion of the ethics of collecting queer porn and the forces against it, such as the police.

Jordan King, *Untitled*, 2020. Polaroids, 3.5” x 4.5” each. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Further, on the back wall, self-portrait polaroid snapshots–Untitled (2020) by Jordan King–capture burlesque-inspired glamour shots, with King donned in a skin-tight red dress, feathers, and red lipstick. Dallas explained how King is a big fan of the drag performer International Chrysis. King was relocating to New York and showed up to an apartment viewing she found on Craigslist. While looking around, she noticed polaroids of the performer in the apartment. As it turns out, the tenant (and King’s future roommate) was a friend of Chrysis. King recreates the glamorous images she found in the apartment, continuing International Chrysis’ legacy—which could be a coincidence or the pearl string of fate. The original images that served as inspiration are alongside the reiterations. The photos spotlight how, due to institutional failure, the LGBTQ2S+ community ultimately becomes the caretakers and archivists of our own community and how we inherit these images and honour their legacy.

Kama La Mackerel, *Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard*, 2019. Inkjet on silk paper, 24” x 16” each. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Kama La Mackerel’s self-portraiture series Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard (2019) reflects on the tourist postcards depicting a crafted paradise that erases the native populations, specifically in Mauritius. Trans femmes and women are erased in these colonial depictions of land without a trace of its native inhabitants. The cultural heritage and queerness itself are often shrouded by colonial and heteronormative values instead. La Mackerel poses in front of a vast and beautiful background of fields and mountains, centering and reasserting themselves into the picture. La Mackerel challenges these postcards as a capitalistic tactic to bring tourists and settlers to the land stewarded by the Indigenous population for centuries through the empowering stances before the landscape.

The video Gut Feelings: Fragments of Truth (2021), by artist Kasra Jalilipour, explores the life (and imagined life) of the Qajar era historical figure Zahra Khanum, also known as Tāj al-Saltaneh. The 3D modelling software version of Tāj al-Saltaneh spinning around a vibrant background reimagines the gaps of what the historical archive has erased or omitted. The voiceover is reminiscent of a letter to an old friend. Jalilipour looks at the way that Tāj al-Saltaneh is filtered through Eurocentric and misogynist standards. A meme circulated online (which conflated her and her sister, Esmat) comments with surprise at how she had rejected 13 men who then killed themselves, labelling her as unattractive. Jalilipour is also interested in how her androgyny implies her unattractiveness.

Kasra Jalilipour, *Gut Feelings: Fragments of Truth* and *Gut Feelings: Fragments of Fiction*, 2021. Video, 12:16 and 3:04. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Jalilipour poses the question to AI, what do Iranian women look like? They scroll through image-search feeds that depict white-washed versions of Iranian women in an image search. When they tried recreating al-Saltaneh through a game, they did not have much success, and the game software could not correctly identify her ethnic background or gender. Through the fictional media essay, Jalilipour speculates on Tāj al-Saltaneh’s queerness since she was linked to Queen Maria Anna of Spain. When they tried to google Tāj al-Saltaneh, images of Queen Maria Anna of Spain also came up. They infer a secret romance between the two as well as their frustration that it was easier to recreate Maria Anna in the game with its Eurocentric design features. Jalilipour also reflects on how natural showing affection to other women was historically with awe and admiration.

Suspended from the ceiling, Lan “Florence” Yee’s textile work PROOF (2022-2023) reflects on what classifies a queer image and the labour that lies behind it. In the background are discarded chairs overlaid with the hand-embroidered text PROOF, like a printed photograph proof. Yee asserts that human rights should be inherent and challenges how the archive erases queer and trans narratives through its structure, notably the queer Asian histories and other racialized queer people. Nothing should have to be proven to gain rights and respect from others. They use humour and irony by using the imagery of chairs— perhaps it’s the conversations that happen in these chairs through community organizing that matter most.

Lan “Florence” Yee, *Leaving Space*, 2019. Hand-embroidered nylon thread, tulle, and galvanized steel wire, 10″ x 7.5″ x 15″, set of three boxes. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Down the hallway in a meeting room is Yee’s Leaving Space (2019), consisting of sewn, transparent baskets reading “for the unrecordable,” “for the unrecorded,” and “the yet to be recorded.” The work references archival bank boxes, although its soft fabric reminded me of a laundry storage basket, adding a further touch of humour. The fabric sculpture acts as an altar for the voices silenced or looked over by colonial archives but ends on a hopeful note that their voices will still be remembered and recorded.

The exhibit wonderfully explores the personal record-keeping and storytelling that takes place when the colonial archive has suppressed and erased queer voices. Mnemonic Silences, Disappearing Acts looks at the way that archives have not only excluded queer stories but are used as means of surveillance when they do include them. The highlights of the exhibit are the creative approaches artists bring when it comes to using the queer imagination to reimagine the gaps and erasures in the archive.

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

What if I Knew? by Mona Sahi: On Censorship and Brutality in Iran

Mona Sahi – “Metamorphosis” (fragment), 2023; scratch on birch panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

Curated by Asal Andarzipour

Harcourt House Artist Run Centre

July 28 to September 9, 2023

By Freyja T. Catton

Mona Sahi is an Iranian artist who now lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Shortly after she arrived in Edmonton in early 2021, Sahi befriended fellow Iranian artist and curator Asal Andarzipour, who arrived in Edmonton in 2018. Sahi and Andarzipour are kindred spirits, both women artists who grew up in Iran around the same time. In the summer of 2023, Andarzipour curated Sahi’s inaugural Canadian exhibition at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre in Edmonton, Alberta. What If I Knew?^[1] ran from July 28 to September 9, 2023, and shows Sahi’s multidisciplinary works from the past year that confront brutality in Iran.

The catalyst for What If I Knew was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, Amini was arrested and beaten by the morality police in Tehran, Iran for wearing her hijab improperly. Arrests and beatings by the morality police have been commonplace for many years in Iran, but this was the first known death as a result. Amini’s death sparked a global uproar against the morality police and the religious government that sanctioned them.^[2] Protestors are still being attacked by government forces, sometimes murdered, sometimes vanished. The Kurdish Jineaology (feminist) phrase “Jin, Jian, Azadi” was chanted at Amini’s funeral,^[3] and the English translation, “Woman, Life, Freedom,”^[4] has become the motto of the current feminist movement in Iran.

In Edmonton, Sahi and Andarzipour were horrified by the news of Amini’s death. They felt helpless being so far away and wanted to raise awareness of the events to help. One of the most compelling ways they have done this is through the powerful combination of Sahi’s art and Andarzipour’s writing. In What If I Knew, Sahi uses her art to initiate conversations about the consequences of corrupt power. Andarzipour uses her writing to provide context and understanding of the events for a Western audience with her extensive knowledge of Iranian history and art history.

Mona Sahi – “Self Portrait”, 2023; acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

Absurdity of Oppression

It is important to understand that the culture of Iran is a separate entity from the religious government. The over 2,500-year-old culture of Iran refers to the people—family, friends, and cultural and regional memory. Iran moved to a centralized and constitutional monarchy, the Qajar Dynasty, in the 1800s^[5]. During the Pahlavi Dynasty from 1925-1979, women’s clothing became an inseparable part of the political scene during the time of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Political unrest and uprisings in the 1970s led to the end of the Iranian monarchy in 1979. It was replaced by the Islamic Republic at the end of the Islamic Revolution, which remains in power to the present day.

The Islamic Republic can be described as theological colonialism^[6], as it oppresses civilians and imposes strict legislative sanctions on the cultural practices of Iranians. Women’s clothing has been a point of legislation for the last hundred years or so, but hijabs have been compulsory for women since 1981.^[7] Sanctions such as dress codes are enforced by the morality police. In 1987, the Islamic Republic created the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to monitor and guide the ethics, values, and narrative of Iran.^[8] This includes approval or banning of art exhibitions, films, writing, and journalism.

Censorship and brutality often go hand in hand with oppressive regimes. Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Guidance and the morality police work in tandem to oppress civilians, especially women. Art, films, TV shows, music, and other creative and intellectual pursuits are frequently banned for promoting unapproved values. Intellectuals and film directors are sometimes killed or go missing. Censorship seeks to limit dissent, prevent access to “the real story,” and control the intellect of the people, while brutality seeks to impose physical limitations on what the body and mind can do. Strategies of censorship and brutality reinforce each other to prevent civilians from resisting the prescribed norms of the government regime.

Resistance doesn’t have to be obvious, but it does need to be intentional.

Resistance

Resistance doesn’t have to be obvious, but it does need to be intentional. How women resist oppressive regimes is linked to how they live and celebrate their personal lives. Sharing rumours and gossip can be a method of resistance against government propaganda. Dancing and celebration of life can show resistance against bodily and cultural control. Personalizing a hijab or using images of houses to represent people are both subtle and subversive expressions of freedom. As a practicing artist in Iran, Sahi displayed her paintings and learned how to use metaphors and symbolism to communicate without inviting censorship.

Protests like “Woman, Life, Freedom” are significant and powerful displays of resistance. Civilian protests have popped up regularly throughout Iran’s recent history in 2019 and 2022. In 2019-2020, the “Bloody Aban” protests erupted in response to prolonged economic hardship.^[9] 2022 saw the death of Amini and the protests that erupted in response. In each, the police response was violent and resulted in civilian death. With faster news cycles, it seems like the cycle of protests has been speeding up in recent years. Censorship issues worldwide are linked to misinformation, banning of resources, discrimination, harassment, and civilian violence or judicial brutality. Catalyst moments like the death of Amini point out how absurd oppression can be. The political becomes personal because what happens in the news is happening to people like us. This could be us.

What If I Knew?

Sahi’s work in What If I Knew? includes paintings, drawings, ceramics, an audio piece, and interactions from the audience. Instead of tempering her message to avoid censorship, she now has to avoid making the intense topic too overwhelming for either herself or the viewer. To develop her visual language for a new audience, Sahi has been experimenting with new mediums—particularly performance, installation, and audio. Each project focuses on different aspects of the brutality in Iran.

Upon entry to the exhibition’s opening, Sahi invited visitors to wear a blindfold over one eye. This visual limitation simulated the experience of protestors in Iran, hundreds of whom were shot in the eyes by security forces during the 2022 September uprisings.^[10]

Black and white drawings of embryos combined with the title prompt the realization that we do not know what anyone will grow up to become, or the impact that one person’s development will have on the world at large. Who is responsible for the development of dictators who condemn protestors? What if I knew this baby would grow up to become an oppressive dictator? Could I have prevented the deaths of my people?

1500+ responds to the protests in 2019-2020 when the Iranian government violently cracked down on peaceful protests. Placed in the centre of the gallery, this installation is a series of cast and painted ceramic bullets arranged upright in black sand. The bullets look highly realistic, and the upright grid formation resembles soldiers standing at attention. “People went to the streets for peaceful protest because of the price of gas, and the government massacred 1800 people,” explains Sahi. “The black sand is a symbol for oil. People are dying for it, we’re losing our lives. The actual number of bullet shells is more than that because the regime never stopped killing people.^[11]” If the piece had been created in Iran, Sahi could have collected actual bullets off the ground. Instead, the bullets are recreated with ceramic clay from 17 different molds of the same kind of bullets used by the government against protestors. By recreating them out of clay, Sahi references religious narratives of human creation from clay, pointing to the use of the Islamic religion for oppression and control in Iran.

Can You Hear Me Now? is an audio piece that responds to the death of activist Mohammad Moradi by recreating the sound of someone drowning.^[12] Moradi’s suicide in December 2022 by drowning in the Rhône River was a final act of protest—a demand for people to listen to the atrocities in Iran. He was far away from Iran, feeling helpless and trying to get people to pay attention. It did not work. Sahi reminds us of his story and asks the same overwhelming questions that Moradi did. How do you get people to listen? What do you do when no one is listening?

Sahi and Andarzipour demonstrate how to use art as an act of resistance. By addressing this emotional weight head-on and by speaking from personal experiences, they remind us of the connections between cultural resilience and resistance. They suggest that by being aware of historical precedence, we can replace corruption with transparency and accountability. We can use art to resist censorship and to note the absurdity of oppressive regimes.

Each piece is inspired by one specific event relating to brutality in Iran, but the overarching messages apply to other experiences. 1500+ could be interpreted as protest art about gun violence in the United States. Can You Hear Me Now? shares feelings of overwhelming helplessness and/or violence. The embryo drawings could connect to the politicization of reproductive health. The common thread between these stories is the brutality that corrupt governments impose on civilians and the weight of anxiety and survivor’s guilt that results.

Artist Mona Sahi and curator Asal Andarzipour at the opening reception of *What If I Knew,* July 28, 2023. Photo by Kamyar Pouyeh.

In Sahi’s work, medium and imagery are used in combination to convey meaning. Each piece in What If I Knew? relates to a defined point in time, such as the deaths of 1500 protestors in 2019-2020, or the death of Moradi in December 2022. The exhibition is timeless in that it talks about how colonialism uses specific methods of censorship and brutality to impose control over a civilian population. Sahi shows how the Islamic Republic government uses censorship to impose colonial ideals and ways of life onto a population with its own distinct culture, as well as how the Islamic Republic uses brutality to reinforce those ways of life and to punish resistance.

Sahi’s art and Andarzipour’s writing work together to resist messages from the Islamic Republic and to prioritize lived experiences. They use their position in Canada to identify atrocities, name those responsible, and seek justice. Reconciliation is only possible if we know what is happening.

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

^[1] Mona Sahi: What If I Knew? Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, July 28-September 9, 2023.https://harcourthouse.ab.ca/mona-sahi/

^[2] “Mahsa Amini: What we know after 11 days of protests in Iran.” Maziar Motamedi, Al Jazeera, September 28, 2022.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/28/what-we-know-after-11-days-of-protests –in-iran

^[3] “CMHR marks anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death in Iranian custody with display of Woman, Life, Freedom banner.” CBC News, September 15, 2023.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/hajar-moradi-banner-mahsa-amini-death-human-rights-museum-1.6967751

^[4] Woman Life Freedom. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://www.womanlifefreedom.today/

^[5] “Iran (Persia), 1800-1900 A.D.” The Metropolitian Museum of Art. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/10/wai.html

^[6] “How the Islamic Republic colonised Iran” by Maryam Aslany and Rana Dasgupta. The New Statesman, September 25, 2023. https://www.newstatesman.com/international-content/2023/09/islamic-republic-colonised-iran

^[7] “Parliament Passes New “Hijab and Chastity” Bill” by The Iran Primer, United States Institute of Peace, September 25, 2023. https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2023/sep/25/parliament-passes-new-%E2%80%9Chijab-and-chastity%E2%80%9D-bill

^[8] “Responsibilities and organizational structure of Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance” by the Secretariat of Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution. Iran Culture, August 3, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20080803173726/http://www.iranculture.org/en/nahad/ershad.php

^[9] “Iran: More than 100 protesters believed to be killed as top officials give green light to crush protests.” Amnesty International, November 19, 2019. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/11/iran-more-than-100-protesters-believed-to-be-killed-as-top-officials-give-green-light-to-crush-protests/

^[10] “Eyes That No Longer See: A Story Of Resistance, Exile, And Sorrow” by Maryam Moqaddam and Masoud Kazemi. Iran International, September 28, 2023. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202309286011

^[11] “The List: Mona Sahi’s What If I Knew? at Harcourt House confronts brutality in Iran” by Fish Griwkowsky. Edmonton Journal, August 4, 2023. https://edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/local-arts/the-list-mona-sahis-what-if-i-knew-at-harcourt-house-confronts-brutality-in-iran-2

^[12] “Activist Moradi’s death in France shakes distressed members of Iranian diaspora” by Arab News, December 31, 2022. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2224426/world