Being-With, Being Known: Critical Fictions by Hannah Godfrey

Critical Fictions by Hannah Godfrey. ARP Books. Image courtesy of the author.

By Jaz Papadopoulos

“Learning changes when relational context changes.”

  • Leanne Betasamosake Simpson[1]

“[W]e could not hear a melody as melody if our immediate appreciation of the note before our ears was not accompanied by our ‘memory’ of the note just before and an expectation of the note to follow.”

  • Eva Hoffman[2]

 

Between the covers of Critical Fictions, the latest collection from poet, storyteller, and art writer Hannah Godfrey, a pulse beats: a lineage and testament of queer intimacies is alive.

The five artists discussed within its pages––Derek Dunlop, Kristin Nelson, Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, AO Roberts, and Logan MacDonald––Godfrey knows on personal levels. Winnipeg is a mid-sized Prairie city, full of artists and social atmospheres in which to meet them; it would be difficult not to. I have also met most of the artists in question. We’ve shared dance floors, studio visits, and the occasional diasporic lineage-seeking trip back to the home country. Herein lies the crux of the text: where formal fields of discussion and analysis traditionally prioritize distance, objectivity, and supposed lack-of-relationship, Critical Fictions knows that we must “hold things to understand them, not as a means of tactile analysis, but…as a means of being-with.”[3]

At her Winnipeg book launch, Godfrey was asked about her choice to write about the work of artists she knows. (The text goes so far as to name one of the artists as chosen family.)

Somewhat bashfully, Godfrey shared that she considers this book a “book of love,” a text about artists and artworks to whom she feels affectionately and intimately connected. Godfrey’s assertion––the right to write about those she loves rather than see it as a conflict of interest––is a transgressive act prioritizing proximity and intimate knowledge over normative analysis. This is especially poignant in a queer context: we know so little about our queer ancestors, our history, and our culture; it becomes imperative to share the queer stories that we do know well.

Beyond relationships themselves, Godfrey introduces readers to the codes of queer history and art, while role modeling curiosity and the process of meaning-making. Godfrey’s book intimately and responsibly documents queer bodies of work, ensuring they are not lost to time, spatial distance (physical artworks that only exist in specific places, if also the internet), and the erasure of hegemonic narratives. 

RELATIONSHIPS, KNOWING, AND UNDERSTANDING

Intimacy need not be complicated. It can simply be the act of knowing: pink is Derek Dunlop’s favourite colour; he rubbed this part of the painting with his fingers. Such simplicity gives a sense of purity and an ability to see things as they truly are.

Dunlop is an artist making prints and installations, many of which the book discusses in relation to queerness, cruising, and the outdoors. One piece in particular, an installation titled Garden, is composed of “found objects and mud taken from the banks of the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg.”[4]

Knowing this river is key to understanding this piece. I have walked its banks innumerable times, in all seasons, save for when it’s flooded its paths. Godfrey, a Winnipeg resident for nearly a decade, has also developed a familiarity with the river, going so far as to audio-record river walks to play on her former community radio show, MonkeySparrow. Without knowing this river, one might see metal, cement, and rocks when looking at Garden. With more proximity, one would know that this river is a site for gay cruising and is one of the flows that brought colonial expansion into the Prairies. Downtown, it connects with the Red River, a site often dredged for Missing and Murdered Indigenous women.

Neither understanding is truer. Just as we come to know a friend better over time, so too we can better understand art by learning more about it. It’s not that you can’t or don’t know the art, but that you can always know it more.

Intimacy allows a depth of understanding. It assigns meaning to the codes embedded in queer culture and artwork alike. Godfrey’s use of association shows how one can labour to make meaning. It doesn’t try to be exclusionary, but it does not hide from the simple fact that closeness leads to understanding.

CODES AND UNDERSTANDING

Codes: an in-group language composed of symbols that communicate information, often in layered ways that require the navigation of many possible meanings.

Godfrey is aware of how her own units of meaning––words––are also encoded symbols and wields them with both precision and generosity. Just as Godfrey supports the reader in learning some of the codes in art and queer art, she makes clear the sheer quantity of choices that (can) go into creating artwork.

The outcome? There is no reason to shrug something off because “it just doesn’t make sense” or you “just don’t get it.” Take AO Roberts’ Say It Ain’t So: a series of prints where, at first glance, four words are printed on a darkly painted background. In fact, the text is hollow, “nodding at the porousness of language and context,”[5] and the “paint” is actually lampblack: smoke captured by the page, seemingly in motion around and within the outlined bodies of the words. Each set of words is from a particular era in human history––all different eras, but all pre-Industrial religious ones. Recognizing these different components as intentional communication choices leads to a much broader meaning than simply seeing four unusual words on darkly printed paper.

Finally, Godfrey supports readers in their own efforts to both perceive art and interpret her wordage. For example, she writes “The partialness (incompleteness) of Dunlop’s depictions speaks to the partialness (bias) of information and dissemination.”[6] By connecting the two distinct concepts of incompleteness and bias through a shared spelling––partialness––Godfrey offers one mode of recognizing artistic meaning through a sort of linguistic/conceptual repetition. Similarly, she identifies motifs of bondage to refer to a sexual practice, a form of kinship, and indebtedness.

In this way, discussing art––especially within the specificity of queer art––almost becomes the work of translation. Anne Carson’s translation of Catullus prompts the question, “There are so many words associated with each one; how does anything ever get translated or settled upon?”[7]

FOOTNOTES, PHOTOS, AND PARENTHETICALS

Critical Fictions’ abundant footnotes and absence of photos further assert the value of lineage and reciprocity.

The footnotes––averaging over 50 per essay––highlight both lineage and context as important modes of understanding. Though Western culture’s art writing prioritizes the individual (and the intellect of the individual), other more collectivist cultures prioritize stating where you and your family are from, from where you learned ideas, and who your mentors and teachers are. Choosing to use footnotes, rather than a less visible Endnotes section, lays it all on the table: there are citations for quotes, but also extra contextual information, tangential references, and statements of gratitude to those who directed Godfrey’s thinking and writing.

The effusiveness of Godfrey’s citation points to her valuation of lineage and interconnected webs of knowledge and offers readers a path forward should they wish to continue exploring one of the topics discussed in the book.

Often, art writing is accompanied by photos––visual aids so the reader may see what is being described in the text. Critical Fictions offers no such concession. Relationships take effort and reciprocity. The piles of words thought, written, and ordered over 219 pages show Godfrey’s efforts: years of viewing, pondering, discussing, researching. The act of opening an internet browser and searching for the works and exhibitions described is the reader’s (optional) task. To understand something is to work to understand it; you will only be led so far without reciprocity. True, I did not look up each piece discussed, but I did search for each artist’s website and exhibit––all were easily found online, Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s yaya/ayat the only one behind a paywall, and a modest one at that ($3).

This itself seems a light-handed approach to coding and withholding, demanding reciprocity. All the information is available but is not quite placed in your palms. To understand, you too must do some seeking.

Another way to interpret the lack of images might be a resistance to the impulse to mistake images for the Truth. In her section about Logan MacDonald, Godfrey quotes Daniel Francis in his discussion of the use of photography as a colonial mode of knowledge-creation: “The image-makers returned from Indian Country with their images and displayed them as actual representations of the way Indians really were.”[8] Where images assert an objective representation of photo-as-thing, a relational approach to seeking and understanding engenders a much more nuanced and subjective perspective. [9]

It must be said eventually, and here seems as fair a place as any: the structure of this book is unusual. It is composed of five sections, each concerned with a particular artist, each bisected into two smaller sections: an essay, and “Fictions.” In the Fictions, Godfrey responds to each artists’ work through creative writing: poems and short stories.

One story, “Found object (fur stretcher, elastic bands)” imagines the scene that led to the creation of Dunlop’s Device for speaking to the dead, (fur stretcher, elastic bands, 2016). Godfrey weaves together themes identified and discussed in her essay––wilderness, haunting, cruising, erotics, backtracking, colour––and builds a rather beautiful basket in which to hold the sculpture––28 coloured elastic bands tightly wrapped around a wooden fur stretcher, evoking cock rings, a door, a tombstone.

“Homage to Hannah Arendt” (within Kristin Nelson’s section) is an experimental poetry piece made entirely of punctuation. Where many would leave such a work to “speak for itself”––without regard for its (il)legibility in the eyes of a viewer––Godfrey kindly leaves a footnote explaining the piece’s meaning. In this way, she props the door open behind her, letting the reader peek through and understand. Through this generous guidance, Godfrey leaves her readers more and more ready to understand a future experimental encounter.

This approach to artwork––casting a wide net of associations and seeing what stays––is replicated in Godfrey’s fictions. It shows how creation begets creation, and though a piece of art has its own background, references, theoretical underpinnings, and meanings, there is an entirely other world of production made by simply creating something so that others may digest it and be spurred to their own thoughts and creativities. One way to perceive art is to seek to conceptually understand it; another is to be spurred into creativity.               

FIN

Make no mistake, this book is rigorous. I learned enough to sprout a prosaic collection of queer art history, no doubt. And yet, as is Godfrey’s style, it is a discourse given amongst friends, shoulder-warming on a couch surrounded by books. It is a reminder of what rigor can look like in queerness, before such political efforts were moved behind the doors of academia, hoarded by button ups and thick rims. It is the table before us, full of snacks, this one from an uncle’s olive trees in the Peloponnese, that one a recipe passed down from a beloved past friend, this bottle inherited from a lover long gone who we may still taste on our lips. The stories that live on in the quiet places, between kin.

[1] Leanne Betasamosake Simposon, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 165, quoted in Hannah Godfrey, Critical Fictions (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2023), 196.

[2] Eva Hoffman, Time (New York: Picador, 2009), 65, quoted in Critical Fictions, 79.

[3] Critical Fictions, 203. A concept shared in reference to Logan MacDonald’s artist talk.

[4] Ibid, 37-8.

[5] Ibid, 154.

[6] Ibid, 21.         

[7] Ibid, 58.

[8] Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992), quoted in Critical Fictions, 205.

[9] Similar arguments against photos-as-truth are made by Orientalist theorist Edward Said.

Part Two: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by Aysia Tse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Women to Everyone: In Conversation with Mulieris Magazine

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

Interview by Irene Bernardi

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

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

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

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

Mulieris Magazine. Photo by Sara Lorusso.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Memory Mirror by Lares Feliciano: A Reflection on Recollection

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

Lares Feliciano

Denver Art Museum

July 4, 2021 – June 18, 2023

By Alida Kress

Lares Feliciano transforms the Denver Art Museum’s Precourt Family Discovery Hall into a timeless, vibrant sanctuary of nostalgia with her multimedia installation, Memory Mirror.  Her stylized work moves viewers to confront their relationships with memory and explore the history of the marginalized communities who have shaped Denver’s history. Feliciano’s extensive use of the gallery space encourages viewers to interact with the installation’s various elements. As such, she creates a piece that invites viewers to see her work and become part of it themselves.

As I approach the gallery, I am beckoned in by the sounds of jazz softly underlying an audial collage of recorded memories. Enormous flowers bloom on vintage wallpaper adorning the walls in a 1970s supergraphics style, and from behind the colorful blossoms, grey-toned faces peer down at me. 

Shadow boxes containing sentimental items donated by the Denver public hang on the wall and, across the room, two vintage chairs invite me to sit. An old TV, globe, rotary phone, and other vintage items accompany the chairs in their place on a large rug. Although these items were foreign to me, something about their arrangement felt comfortable, almost familiar. 

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

Graphics stylistically akin to hand-drawn, children’s book illustrations are projected on a large oval frame. The cheerful animations provide visual accompaniment to the memories being recounted overhead. I felt compelled to look at each item in the shadow boxes, sit in the chairs, spin the globe, and even dial my number on the rotary phone. All elements of the installation work in conjunction to instill a sense of hazy nostalgia in me which I yearned to follow to some philosophical conclusion. 

Lares Feliciano is a Denver-based artist from California who works in multimedia design to create interactive art installations. The local artist has another installation at Meow Wolf Denver, an artist collective that collaborates with local artists to create maximalist, interactive art installations at permanent locations across the U.S.[1] At the installation in Denver, Feliciano applies her unique artistic style to breathe life into the Portals of Theseus collection.[2] The whimsical nature of her work with Meow Wolf remains evident within this installation as well. 

 Memory Mirror opened in July of 2021 and will continue through June 18th of 2023. Prior to the installation’s debut, Feliciano set up an in-person event and a phone number at which the public could leave a voicemail recalling a significant memory of theirs. Participants were also invited to donate images and items of sentimental value to be displayed in the gallery. The photographs incorporated into the wallpapers are partially these images donated by participants, but most were taken from the Denver Library’s official archives and depict a wide range of Denver’s diverse cultural history. 

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

In my conversation with Feliciano, she shared that her inspiration for the piece came largely from her dad who passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was 16. Recalling her own relationship with memory and her dad, she notes that memory is an intangible thing, the loss of which, however, is incredibly tangible. Thus, in Memory Mirror, she attempts to capture tangible markers of memory that not only reflect the associated moment in the donor’s life, but also their relationship with the memory as they recall it. She stated that the installation is not trying to make sense of memory or give it any type of order, but simply to give it a place. 

In asking Feliciano about what she hoped viewers might gain from experiencing the installation, she said, “Hopefully their own nostalgia is triggered and they are forced to remember… anything.” For me, the piece was a way to interact with and process trauma. The nature of the space encouraged me to recall difficult memories and sit with them in ways I hadn’t before. The space was soft and calm, and it felt as though the words tumbling from my mouth had a safe place to exist outside of my own mind.  

In an interview with Westword, Feliciano shared, “My work often evokes a dreamlike nostalgia where decades overlap and all of time exists at once.”[3] This sentiment is incredibly apparent in the installation. While much of the installation is a call to self-reflection, just as significant is how it spotlights the history of Denver’s marginalized communities. The images Feliciano edited into the flowers on the wallpapers feature mainly people of color. These photos feature nostalgic photographs of varying levels of formality. Feliciano showcases a history of people of color in Denver by including everything from images of CU Denver’s minority student organizations in the 1950s to an image of Denver’s Bruce Randolf at his street naming ceremony. Feliciano described this part of the installation as a method to “give them their flowers,” sharing that she “had no idea what sort of celebrations have existed for any of these people, but they’re here if nothing else.”

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

In the wake of the pandemic, Feliciano wanted to acknowledge how hard it is to exist, but also how powerful it is to be able to remember something good. We discussed the potential of all of time existing at once, and how recognizing that is an incredible way to deal with grief and trauma. For anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Memory Mirror is a step towards seeing every moment of life all at once, like one would behold a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.[4]

 Feliciano’s work urges her viewers to lean into the resemblance Memory Mirror holds to a relative’s living room. It encourages viewers to sit in that nostalgia either to process their relationship with memory or to learn a little more about Denver’s collective memory and the histories of marginalized communities so often written out of colonial history books.

Memory Mirror facilitates a multifaceted experience in which the viewer is invited to explore not only their own memories, but the memory of the city they are in. Feliciano has created a piece that cradles the viewer’s internal child and allows them the space and safety to sit, feel, and remember. 

[1] “Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences,” Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences, accessed April 2023, https://meowwolf.com/.

[2]“Meow Wolf Denver Introduced Portals of Theseus,” Taking The Kids, January 7, 2023, https://takingthekids.com/meow-wolf-denver-introduced-portals-of-theseus/.

[3] Kyle Harris, “Lares Feliciano Wants Your Memories for a Denver Art Museum Installation,” Westword (Westword, March 17, 2021), https://www.westword.com/arts/lares-feliciano-collects-memories-for-memory-mirror-at-the-denver-art-museum-11921404.

[4] Jr Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 86.

Make Me Less Evil: In Conversation with Angie Quick

Angie Quick. Make Me Less Evil installation shot, Museum London. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Adi Berardini

The first thing to know about Angie Quick is that she isn’t afraid to express herself. Whether that means speaking her mind or making fluid and fleshy paintings, Quick has a way of captivating an audience. I have gotten to know Angie since she is my studio mate and last spring, we switched studio spaces. We helped each other move our paintings and supplies, and I admit, I may have gotten a bit excited about stumbling upon one of the erotic lesbian magazines she uses as a reference. Tenderness across time is at the forefront of Quick’s mind. Inspired by the everyday and encapsulating effortless eroticism, she is interested in how modern life can seem just as antiquated as the classical periods before and what it means to envision a more empowered way of being.

Working in both painting and performance as a medium, Quick is a self-taught artist who has established herself in the local London art scene over the past years. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Moonlight Made Me Do It at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021 and when i die i will have loved everything at Glenhyrst Gallery in 2019. She has had an exciting year with her first commercial solo show at the Michael Gibson Gallery, A Life of Crime, and an exhibition at Museum London, entitled Make Me Less Evil. Quick forefronts the question: Can art make you less evil? 

Angie Quick. i won’t be happy until you’re dead, 72x60in., oil on canvas, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Can you explain more about your exhibition ‘Make Me Less Evil’ at the Museum London and your inspiration behind it?

I didn’t know what the show was going to look like. I was just looking at stuff, researching, trying to figure out what I wanted to make. The earlier paintings were the Vermeer paintings. I was looking at a lot of Vermeer work and that was the impetus for it.

I was looking at classical works and the idea of the figure within them. That body of work is about tenderness and vulnerability and looking at intimacy. And I think that was often portrayed through bodies and the title Make Me Less Evil. That came midway while I was working on the series.

I was thinking a lot about personal ethics, like the idea of [someone] asking to be made less evil. But then also the power of art and if art can make one less evil, by the viewer looking at the work. I like that title as an overarching theme because as I was making the work, it just seemed fitting. I think because people find some of my work eroticism or see erotic things within it there’s like this “turning away.” I think it’s asking a question of the viewer and embracing it.

Angie Quick Make Me Less Evil installation shot, Vermeer inspired series. Museum London. Image courtesy of the artist.

The way I interpreted it is a lot of times, especially women, if they’re promiscuous or sexual, they’re made out to be “evil” when that’s not the same standard as men. So, I thought that was an interesting title because it’s almost reclaiming eroticism itself.

 I felt like the title could mean something to anyone who reads it because I think anyone could have a sense of what that looks like to be made less evil or what they carry within themselves or what society puts on [them]. I think a lot of my work is breaking down those boundaries of what we consider right or wrong or what we’re allowed to do or not allowed to do.

In addition to ‘Make Me Less Evil’ you recently had a solo show at Michael Gibson Gallery, A Life of Crime. A Life of Crime deals more with the implication of people in the space, with a more abstract approach and an inspiration from the Rococo era of opulence. On the other hand, ‘Make Me Less Evil’ is more erotic and depicts people in intimate settings. Can you explain the difference in your artistic vision in ‘A Life of Crime?’

I feel like the difference is more something I can see once I saw both works separately, but they almost bled into each other. They were similar and yet different. I made the museum work, but as I was making the museum work, Michael Gibson asked me to do this exhibition.

I made a whole new body of work and some of the work that was going to go to the museum ended up going to the Gibson Gallery. I think there must have been a shift occurring where fewer bodies were visibly present within the work. And it was almost like the bodies are present but absent at the same time. Whereas within the museum work, they’re very much in your face and present. I don’t know why that shift started happening. I do think I was looking at more Rococo work and more at the furniture and the interiors and the sense of someone maybe having just left the room or the memories that exist within the room.

Angie Quick. the night you wore your jogging suit to bed, 60 x 60, oil on canvas, 2022. Museum London. Image courtesy of the artist.

You can see the influence of your everyday life in your paintings. For example, referencing parts of your living room in ‘A Life of Crime’ or your self-portrait Make Me Less Evil depicting yourself napping on your studio couch. Can you explain more about your interest in referencing the everyday in your work? 

 I think everything that I experience in a day culminates onto the canvas. Not so much that it’s a portrait of myself, but I think my interest in being obsessed with something in my everyday life can make its way into the canvas and then it is next to something not directly related to me.

I think those things being in relation allows room for a viewer to make their own narrative within the canvas. So [that’s] why I like having personal stuff—it’s the same with my titles. My titles are probably the most autobiographical parts of all the paintings because those are usually direct snippets from my life while I’m working.

I think that kind of sensibility also lends itself to personal items that make it into [the work]. And I like the idea that there are moments in the canvas that are maybe just for me, but then suddenly it’s for everyone else. I think that the difference between what’s personal and impersonal. The lines blurring is exciting to me.

Can you touch upon your interest in depicting vulnerability in ‘Make Me Less Evil’? Can you also expand on your interest in intimacy and eroticism through your paintings?

It’s one of those things where I maybe am not hyper-aware that I’m making very erotic work. It’s maybe after the fact, having people look at the work and then tell me it’s either shocking or erotic. I don’t think I’m aware of it when I’m making a painting. I like the interactions of bodies and self and it just feels natural for me to come out into those dialogues. I don’t know if it just comes down to being shameless or if that’s just what I’m fascinated and obsessed with.

I love how you spoke about how butts are universal because everyone has one during your artist tour at Museum London.

I don’t even know what the psychoanalysis of that is, but I think there is something about how it’s a non-gendered thing. Everyone has a butt. And I also like the idea of the naked body just existing almost in a timelessness.

But are we just like a Caravaggio painting with a cell phone?

I sometimes wonder how much we’ve progressed or changed as people, when I’m looking at so much classical work and stuff, I think okay, now we have cellphones. But are we just like a Caravaggio painting with a cell phone? There’s so much moralism that still exists and restrictions that I have a hard time thinking that there’s much liberation within a lot of how we live.

I think it’s an interesting parallel to think of, they had letters before, but now we have texts. There are a lot of parallels even though it’s such a different time. 

I think now we can get things more immediately. We still love Shakespeare so much. It makes me think that as people, we only have a certain [number] of emotions and that’s why Shakespeare still seems relevant because it still resonates with all that we can express.

I also love Anne Carson. She’s like a classicist and she’ll take classical work and make it relevant to today so it’s almost like collapsing the timeline. But sometimes I can find that depressing too. It’s not that I don’t believe in progress necessarily, but sometimes when people look at my work and they’re like, “oh, this is happening,” I think that shouldn’t be shocking. It just seems like there’s no change.

You hope and you think that there’s progress, but even just seeing what’s happening now politically, rights are being rolled back. How far have we actually come?

It seems medieval almost. I feel like one of the differences now is that we do have the internet so it’s easier to make propaganda, but it’s also harder at the same time to control a whole population. I can be in communication with somebody in Europe and finding out information and stuff can be translated quicker. But sometimes I think we’re just very medieval, just wearing Adidas or something. Then that sense of humanity is important to me in my work and when I’m saying tenderness, it is seeing people as people.

Angie Quick. the cannoli eaters, 60x120in., oil on canvas, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

You have explained how you are interested in certain symbolism such as animals (lambs, rabbits, etc.) and religious symbolism in art historical contexts. Can you explain more about your use of symbolism?

I think because I was raised by two atheists that religion and Christianity are constantly very shocking to me. I was talking to my mom today about how people can be so horrified about sexuality or just like the freedom of an individual to be themselves.

And yet we can walk by churches all the time and there’s just like crosses and crosses resemble someone being killed. A naked man dying on a cross is constantly in our subconscious. Since I was a kid, I was wrapping my head around that.

I think I find it fascinating how so much of western art history uses those things, but they don’t necessarily mean what they’re supposed to mean to me, they become something else. I think I’m creating a personal narrative and ownership of certain symbols and then playing against universal ones. 

I think I just get attracted to certain things and I’m also really into emojis. I think the emoji is like the modern-day crucifix. It’s a sense of using something to delineate information in the shortest amount of time. And so, utilizing that in painting is interesting to me. And then, I can have my own symbolism that I start to create in my work by constantly or obsessively using it. I think they relate to each other since it’s a pictorial language and that’s why I find it exciting. I like the idea of information being condensed and then becoming something that can mean something to everybody. And then maybe skewing that slightly.

Who are some artists (or other inspirations such as books or music) that influence you and your work?

I like Salman Toor a lot. I liked like his sense of playfulness in his work, but then also there’s like a very strong resonance of personal meaning within it.  

I’ve read a lot of Sheila Heti this year, I read all her work. And Jesse Ball wrote Autoportrait, which is inspired by a [memoir by a French writer Édouard Levé], but I was reading a lot of works of autofiction and auto portrait. I think I was also listening to a podcast, and they were talking about how that’s like a new feminist way of writing and I think it’s taking control of one’s narrative. I find that was very influential in how I was working. I don’t know exactly how, but like somehow just taking in all that information. Anne Carson is also a huge influence.

I’ve always loved Cecily Brown because I think she’s like a good painter’s painter. Yeah, I feel like since I was fifteen, I’ve been haunted by Cecily Brown’s paintings.

Do you have anything you’re working on that you’d like to share?

I’m interested in the idea of horniness. At the Gibson opening, someone described my work as being horny and I love that. That’s the best compliment to me because I feel like that’s such a huge encompassing feeling. I’m interested in it and countering the impulse to procreate, the idea of being horny being almost universal, and the way that we can engage in that and the sense of purpose in life and horniness, but in a liberated sense. Like that horniness is liberation.

I was listening to a podcast with Meeka Walsh, who’s the editor for Border Crossings [Magazine], and she was talking about how a good piece of art makes you want to make love. And I was like, oh, horny. It was a more intellectual way of saying horny—I love that.

Check out Angie Quick’s exhibition Make Me Less Evil on view at Museum London until May 28th, 2023.

Hear on Treaty 7: The Politics of Sound

The Politics of Sound. Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

jamilah malika abu-bakare, Adam Basanta, Marjie Crop Eared Wolf, Maskull Lasserre, Benny Nemer and Jessica Thompson

Curated by Tyler J Stewart
Exhibition design by Jane Edmundson
November 26, 2022 – May 7, 2023

The Galt Museum & Archives

By Migueltzinta Solís

You may have heard of something that unfolded recently here in so-called Lethbridge, Alberta at the University of Lethbridge. Philosophy professor Paul Viminitz, known for saying the n-word in class and for calling a Blackfoot student’s status card his “victim card,” invited residential school denier Frances Widdowson to deliver a lecture against teaching Indigenous Knowledge in secondary education. Thankfully, a mainly student-led grassroots response swiftly changed the University of Lethbridge’s tone from defending “free speech” to – somewhat – acknowledging the grievousness of allowing a bigoted and hateful provocateur to speak on campus. Colonial sound marks and speech acts are unmistakable in this prairie city, from the thundering of the train over the Highlevel Bridge to the gunshots that echo up and down the Old Man River valley from the police department’s shooting range. But these aren’t the only sounds, histories, and voices that make up the aural landscape of Treaty 7 territory.

The Galt Museum & Archives is one of several cultural institutions in Alberta welcoming art exhibitions into their programming, allowing creative work by contemporary artists to bring historical objects, sites, and stories into the present. The Politics of Sound, as exhibited at the Galt, is interpreted for a considerably broad audience, from K-12 school groups to senior citizens to post-secondary students. The didactics which accompany components of The Politics of Sound use accessible language to present thoughtful questions and critically engaged analysis of the works, drawing connections between the artworks and the historical objects on display.

Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s Niitsi’powahsin Secwepemctsín.Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s Niitsi’powahsin Secwepemctsín is a combined video and drawing work that tells the story of her project to reclaim Siksikáí’powahsin and Secwepemctsín language knowledge. Three drawings are flanked by two screens paired with headphones, the videos framing the artist’s mouth, chin, and shoulders. In the video, Crop Eared Wolf wears headphones, repeating Blackfoot words in one video and Secwepemctsín in the other. Putting on the headphones, one hears Crop Eared Wolf speaking sporadically, repeating the words recited by the language tutorial (which is only sometimes audible) she is listening to. We are brought close to witness this act of language revival and survivance, an act which is as much about the embodiment of sounds that happens through listening, as it is about the embodiment that comes from speaking.

Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s drawings pull you in—stepping close, one realizes that the delicate red curving forms are made of individual words in Siksikáí’powahsin and Secwepemctsín, respectively. The words flow, gather, and disperse across the paper like schools of red fish, and looking at them while listening to Crop Eared Wolf’s voice, language is alive, escaping the bind of the Latin alphabet. The images created are a visual expression of the reach for her mother tongue, for the richness of knowing that comes with understanding the untranslatable. Crop Eared Wolf does not speak for the benefit of the listener, rather she speaks for herself, for her cultures. As sonar has reached into the ground to find stolen Indigenous children at Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (Kamloops), so does Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s voice reach into herself and across time to reclaim stolen language-cultures which have survived that same genocidal system.

Adam Basanta. Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Adam Basanta’s exhibited works dodge the entrapments of high conceptual work in favour of sociable and accessible invitations to consider unexpected materializations of sound.In The loudest sound in the room experienced very quietly, a sound as loud as a car horn plays in 30-second intervals, rendered inaudible by the thick double casing in which it is displayed. While simple, the added context of this being shown within a history museum makes me think of the narrative agency of objects which continue to speak to us from within the museum’s vitrine. This work is just a few cases away from a large brass bell, which moves me to think about the colonial sound mark of the bell – church bell, school bell, train bell – as a sound whose ideological impact continues even as it sits deactivated in the archive.

The Politics of Sound. Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Jessica Thompson’s Walking Machine invites the listener to turn the ear toward the self. The “machine” consists of two small microphones that are attached to the cuffs of one’s pants. Through a small, handheld amplifier, the sounds of one’s walking are enjoyed in real time by the walker. While I had expected to hear my own footsteps, I had not expected to hear the creak of my leather boots amplified as well, not to mention the tfff of a dragged left heel. I was instantly taken back to a moment in undergrad when I walked into a friend’s home – a fellow proto-trans man at the time – who called out from another room, “Ah! It’s you!” as soon as he heard my footsteps coming across his wooden floor. When I asked how he knew, he told me he recognized the distinct way I dragged the heels of my oversized Harley Davidson boots. At times feeling like a pocket call to oneself, Walking Machine is successful as a prosthetic for facilitating self-listening, perhaps making a case for distinguishing self-reflection from self-hearing. As a walker, I am given the space to ask, How is the sound of my walking coded? How are my footsteps gendered? Racialized? How do I sound walking on Blackfoot territory? What does it mean to walk on this land as an uninvited guest?

Benny Nemer. The Last Song. Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Benny Nemer’s The Last Song was of particular interest to me from my perspective as a trans man. A screen plays a video of a bald figure who sings – or seems to sing – Vivaldi’s La Verità in Cimento. The performer begins in a baritone and then undergoes a series of warbling breakages as the voice transitions into a soprano. The moment is prolonged and uncomfortable. I am reminded of that feeling of visceral in-betweenness when my voice suddenly changed as part of testosterone treatment. In the video, the performer’s face smooths into exaltation, triumphant in its passing as a different voice altogether. Is this the same singer producing these sounds or are these multiple voices seamlessly edited together? Is the figure the singer at all or are they lip-syncing? Is the singer trans?

Standing before the video, a sweet, musky scent envelopes the viewer/listener, compelling one to look for its source. In a vase on a plinth, a single purple lily gazes back, visually and olfactorily elegant, robust. A quote in French from trans queer theorist Paul B. Preciado is imprinted fancily on the wall alongside the ephemeral lily. In the quote, Preciado describes the experience of a transitioning voice as “a vibration which spreads in my throat as if it was a recording coming out of my mouth.” Though the didactics fall short of overtly saying so, transness importantly appears in this work not as a gender identity but as a sound, a song. The voice’s transition eludes binary linearity and becomes a composition of sensory information, a fleeting act one hears, smells, and feels. This auditory queerness becomes something not unique to trans experience, but an aural interpretation of transition that, if you think about it, can occur to anyone at any point in one’s life.

The Politics of Sound. Opening Reception. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

A trumpet that is also a bayonet, a clarinet with a sniper scope, a music box grenade that plays a song once when the pin is pulled: these are Maskull Lasserre’s Tools for A Second Eden. Fully functioning instruments that are also weapons, these sculptural objects are displayed at the ready, as if they might be deployed to the battlefield at a moment’s notice. Complete with their own custom-made hard-shell cases and mission directives – dossiers containing sheet music for various national anthems and documentation of musicians/soldiers performing with the instruments in situ – Lasserre’s instruments of war are beautiful and frightening. While impressive on their own, Lasserre’s works take on a second layer of importance through their shared staging with historical objects. A display of policing and firefighting equipment (a megaphone, a whistle, speed radars, a steam whistle, and a fire bell) from Lethbridge’s archive brings home the idea of sound as a tool for social ordering and control. One can’t help but ask the same questions of the historical objects as one did of Lasserre’s Tools for A Second Eden: What is it for? Who is it for? Is it dangerous? Interestingly, these are questions one does not always ask of art, but because of the context of a history museum, these questions seem inevitable.

Set apart from the rest of the exhibit, jamilah malika abu-bakare’s audio/photo installation listen to Black women (II) + offerings (III) is a striking space to walk into. An intricately woven mixscape of Black womens’ voices tumbles down from a directional speaker suspended overhead, including the voices of Keke Palmer, Rihanna, Angela Davis, Amara La Negra, Jully Black, and Azealia Banks. I sit on the bench and listen to them precisely speak about their lived realities of racism, sexism, injustice, and invisibility. It is uniquely important to listen to abu-bakare’s speechscape of Black women’s voices in Lethbridge, Alberta, at a time when white voices are actively co-opting the words “freedom” and “free speech” to advance racist agendas. On the walls surrounding the listening space for listen to Black women (II), offerings (III) is displayed as composites made of repeating posters with black and white macro images of jamilah malika abu-bakare’s skin, which visitors are invited to take. I turn one over to find the words of Jully Black:

“whatever you’re feeling
take it to the altar
cause i’m not the one
that’s responsible for
your feelings.”

For us here on Treaty 7 Blackfoot Territory, these last few weeks have called into question the responsibilities of cultural and educational institutions as sites of speech and discourse production. To insist on making space for critical BIPOC and LGBTQS2+ voices speaking to issues of race, gender, Indigenous sovereignties, surveillance, and nationalism continues to be a necessary and radical act. Fostering and protecting such spaces is particularly important in cities like Lethbridge that serve as cultural hubs for rural communities and small towns. Tyler J Stewart’s polyvocal curatorial approach presents questions of sound, speech, power, and relation through creative works which operate in multiple accessible registers. Through the artists’ works, sound as a discourse commodity is queered, no longer a weapon, but rather a series of aural spaces that resist further colonization and co-optation. Sound can be experienced as an expression of question-asking and relation-seeking, and not as hate speech staged by speakers who refuse to take accountability for their own words.

Slip Away in The Flickering: Gretchen Bender’s IMAGE WORLD

Installation View of TV Text & Image series, 2023. Photo by Pei-Shin Hung. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, London.

Sprüth Magers, London

February 3 – 25 March, 2023

By Crystal Li

The walls of CRT monitors broadcasting live television incessantly set you up to an optical battlefield. Without the accompanying soundtracks, your sense of sight is unprecedentedly amplified, generating hyper sensitivity and attention to what comes to your eyes. Welcome to IMAGE WORLD at Sprüth Magers, London, the gallery’s first solo exhibition for Gretchen Bender.

Image World presents Bender’s significance as a ‘guerrilla’ to the Pictures Generation, anchoring her critical edge over television as a rivalling numerator to media culture, politics, and society. “I thought in the early 80s you guys had done such important work on the print media—the photograph. And it seemed like the next area to similarly deconstruct was television,” she said in a 1987 interview with Cindy Sherman. All exhibited works use live television streams or clips as the source material and vary by the ascending level of intervention and editing.

When TV Text & Image series on the ground floor has meticulously chosen, mostly politicized phrases applied to the screens to superimpose over the images, Aggressive Witness – Active Participant, 1990, on the first floor follows in addition with a sinister soundtrack and a computer-generated undulating white line graphics coming from four of the twelve monitors. Wild Dead, 1984, in the final room, radiates a sci-fi colour to the assemblage of monitor, graphics, and sound. Here, Bender juxtaposes the aggressive, pulsating montage of computer-generated motion graphics and appropriated news clips of missile firing and corporate idents with a synthetic soundtrack of yelps and gunshots, commencing her signature type of installation characterized by stacked monitors and fragmented audio-visuals, titled ‘Electronic Theaters.’

Installation View of TV Text & Image series, 2023. Video by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, London.

These works are Bender’s embodied investigation of how the people at her time simultaneously consumed and were consumed by the mainstream media when the then-now cultural landscape was encroached upon by corporate power. Now, television has already dissolved into handy smart gadgets seemingly advancing for more autonomous and individualistic browsing and streaming. These ‘media-oriented artworks’ from the 80s-90s are now in their fate of ‘a temporal limit to its meaningfulness in the culture’ predicted (and accepted) by Bender, also in her interview with Sherman. In this sense, how differently can we re-read her works at Sprüth Magers in 2023 to restore their strength in the present tense?

“I’ll mimic the media—but I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully, it will blast criticality out there,” Bender declared the mimicking of structure as her infiltrating tactic to scrutinize and criticize the mass media.  She is both an insightful observer and an ingenious constructor of experience. Viewing Bender’s works aside from the recurring interpretation of corporate-thick content particularly striking in the 80s, puncturing them purely by our on-site viewing experience allows us to rejuvenate her works in today’s algorithm-heavy media landscape.

Aggressive Witness – Active Participant, 1990. Photo by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, London.

Rather than delving into the well-explored sense of overload in her by-now-signature ‘theatrical exposition of multiple channels’, as evoked in Wild Dead, the illusionary visual effects of disappearing and collapsing only available to in-the-gallery viewing fiercely capture both my eyes and my mind. In TV Text & Image series and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant, the all-caps phrases in black vinyl text stamped center-screen only reveal themselves to the viewers upon closer examination. Otherwise, they disappear into the moving images beneath. Our attention to the phrases in reverse does dilute the live television broadcasts at the back but very often, we are distracted by the ceaselessly fleeting images and ‘blind’ to the phrases upholding political importance. While I was there, PEOPLE WITH AIDS faded into teleshopping when HOMELESS lost to a talk show re-run. The optical illusion of disappearing further aggravates into collapsing. Our sole focus on one screen triggers the flickering of screens surrounding, except the four playing computer-generated geometric graphics. If not being watched or contentless, both the phrases and the moving images of the remaining screens slip away in the flickering.

Bender’s manipulation of our retina resembles the hegemonic nature of every public space, as put forward by Chantel Mouffe in Which Public Space for Critical Artistic Practices? ‘public spaces are always striated and hegemonically structured.’ The spotlight is always exclusively occupied, expelling the others out of the beam of light because public attention is forever limited. Technological transformations in the past decades have usurped television’s dominance, in which social media has replaced mass media and arisen as one of the most heated public spaces. In the explosion of content, competition ‘to be seen’ is no longer natural when it is heavily charged by algorithms — social media’s closest ally. In the digital domain, visibility establishes a marker of recognition and validity.

The gaze on social media is channelled by algorithms, which feeds back ‘the visible’ with more exposure in a close circuit, eventually trapping us in filter bubbles. It is how one’s current interest in fashion and cosmetics automatically closes the gate for her to ANTI-APARTHEID, NUCLEAR WARHEADS SEX PANIC, etc, and in return ‘rewards’ her with more exposure to tempting content on beauty. An algorithm, as a personalized searching configuration, is indeed an arbitrary, rigid programming pre-emptively rejecting alternativity and possibility on our account. Not only does algorithmic visibility deprive our right to a conscious selection, but it also strangles/restricts the digital living space of all visual content along with their embedded discourses and ideologies. 

“We need to stay alert to the political implications of the conceptual evolutions of our newer technologies,” Bender’s cautionary reminder is timeless. Inside Sprüth Magers, the option of what to watch is still entirely available to us. Yet, in reality, the algorithmically sorted social media has quietly cancelled out the option by fixating/narrowing our eyes to only what it thinks we should see. What will slip away in the flickering has already been dictated, yet, in the name of us.

Zanele Muholi: The Celebration of Black LGBTQIA+ Identity

Installation view of the exhibition Zanele Muholi, National Gallery of Iceland, 2022. Courtesy the museum and the artist.

October 15, 2022 – February 12, 2023
National Gallery of Iceland
Laufásvegur 12, 101 Reykjavik

By Irene Bernardi

After the last large exhibition at Tate Modern in London, Zanele Muholi presents their works at the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavik in collaboration with the English museum. Born in Umlazi in Durban, South Africa, Muholi is a visual activist whose focus of their works is to tell the stories of Black [1]LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) lives in South Africa and beyond. All the photos are as unique and special as their connection with the community. Curated by Harpa Þórsdóttir, Vigdís Rún Jónsdóttir, and Yasufumi Nakamori, the exposition counts more than 100 photographs together with video, poster, and documentation about the work of Muholi and the history of apartheid in South Africa.

On the first floor, three ongoing projects are hosted in the principal room. Somnyama Ngonyama (2012-) is a series of self-portraits where Muholi explores the politics of race and its representation. The portraits are photographed in different locations around the world with a focus on talking about the racist gaze; in every shoot, the artist uses objects, materials, and clothes to demonstrate the violence and harmful representation of Black people. The titles of the work “Somnyama Ngonyama” remain in Zulu, Muholi’s first language which means “Hello, Black Lioness”: the title is meant to reclaim their language and identity which is the mirror of Muholi’s activism.

In Nowalzi II, Nuoro, Italy (2015) Muholi narrates the “pencil test”: this was a dehumanizing practice devised to assist the South African government in racial classification under apartheid. When authorities were unsure if a person should be classified as white, a pencil would be pushed into the hair. The person “passed” and was “classified” as white if the pencil didn’t stick in the hair and if it was straight rather than curly, kinky, or coily. Muholi’s gaze is looking at the visitors as if to say “I am here. I can’t be in another place. I am Black, I am who I am, and you must have respect for me.”

Zanele Muholi. Nowalzi II, Nuoro, Italy, 2015. Gelatin silver print on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

In the artist’s shoots, the gaze, the eye, and the power are an important “red thread.” In Faces and Phases (2006 -) Muholi captures more than 500 pictures to celebrate, commemorate and archive the lives of Black lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. Many of these photos are the result of a long and sustained relationship and collaboration, where the main intention is to create an archive of faces and the phases of the changing in their life: memories, stories, aging, education, work experience, and marriage. During the installation, the museum and the artist decided to leave a few white spaces on the wall to remember the people that took part in the project and passed away.

Faces and phases (2006-) Installation view of the exhibition Zanele Muholi, National Gallery of Iceland, 2022. Courtesy of the museum and the artist.


When we are standing in front of these two big artworks, around us there is no silence because we can “feel” an imperceptible sound, caused by the looks of Muholi and the people they have met that speak to us. They have been watching for too long in silence and suffering from the violence and discrimination due to their existence, for being who they are. The black and white of the photos vibrate, like their eyes that communicate their will to speak.

Muholi was born in 1972 during the height of apartheid in South Africa. On the second floor, a room is focused on the particular contexts from which artists’ work emerges and remains deeply rooted: books, fanzines, videos, photos, and posters describe and tell the history of the LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa. A timeline helps the visitors to understand and highlight the new era of democracy after apartheid that ended in 1994. We can also see some pictures from Only Half the Picture (2002–2006) that document survivors of hate crimes living across South Africa and its Townships. Under apartheid, Townships were established as residential areas for those who had been evicted from places designated as ‘white only.’ Muholi captures the people who experienced this pain and hatred with images of intimacy, expanding the narrative beyond victimhood.

Zanele Muholi. Aftermath 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

The last room houses the projects Brave Beauties (2014 -) and some images from Queering Public Space. These photos are related to each other since both present a series of portraits of trans women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people, many of whom are beauty pageant contestants. Muholi is inspired by fashion magazine covers; all the clothes, poses, and accessories are decided together, with the subjects portrayed. Many of the images are taken on the beach in Durban: the artist has continuously photographed Brave Beauties participants on the beach, in particular the beauty queen Melissa Mbambo. Melissa is a trans woman who won the title of Miss Gay South Africa in 2017. During apartheid, she was racially segregated, and photographing her on the beach is a way of reclaiming this space.

Brave Beauties (2014-) Installation view of the exhibition Zanele Muholi, National Gallery of
    Iceland, 2022. Courtesy the museum and the artist.       

This exhibition does not present ‘mere’ pictures or portraits of people. This exhibition is a giant manifesto of existence, of the freedom to be alive and to have a happy and long life. This concept is very clear in Muholi’s mind: “Every person in the pictures has a story to tell, but many of us come from spaces where most Black people never had that opportunity. If they did, their voices were told by other people. No one can tell our story better than ourselves”[2].

Zanele Muholi studied at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, and the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly known as Ryerson University, Toronto), co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media. They are also an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, in Germany.


The MUDEC – Museum of Cultures in Milan, will host the next Muholi exhibition “A Visual Activist. Muholi” from March 31 to July 30, 2023.

[1] Sarah Allen, Yasufumi Nakamori, Zanele Muholi exhibition book, Tate Modern, 2021
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/zanele-muholi/zanele-muholi-glossary

[2] Zanele Muholi, ZANELE MUHOLI, Tate Modern 2021, London (UK), https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/zanele-muholi/zanele-muholi


What Do We Discard? Specimen by Susan Low-Beer

Specimen by Susan Low-Beer. Riverbrink Art Museum. Image Courtesy of the artist.

September 10, 2022 – January 21, 2023

RiverBrink Art Museum

By Lera Kotsyuba

Susan Low-Beer’s ceramic sculptures are uncanny forms that play with the tension between anxiety and care. Travelling across Canada, the exhibition Specimen transforms in each iteration. At the RiverBrink Art Museum in Ontario from September 2022 to January 2023, Specimen, curated by Sheila McMath, shows Low-Beer’s ceramics meld into a quasi-domestic space. Their forms recall organs that drape over industrial forms that are a cold substitution for domestic objects of home, a bed, or a table. The discomfort apparent in rest denotes unease, and the forms, between frail organs and technological refuse, link to our anxieties about aging.

The title, Specimen, recalls a cabinet of curiosities of observation, not the clinical study of medical precision but as objects of fascination, inviting closer observation to make meaning. The exhibition embraces humour and the absurd through the familiar made strange. The uncanny nature of organic forms meeting industrial elements is displayed through the tubes and ovoid shapes to the draped ceramic forms to their rigid grid surface patterns and metal assemblage elements. The works invite closer inspection by pointedly asking the viewer to lean into their discomfort, embrace the absurd and disquieting forms, and contemplate age and decay in the Anthropocene in an era of mass waste.

Specimen by Susan Low-Beer. Riverbrink Art Museum. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Walking through the RiverBrink Museum of Art, the space itself seems caught between two worlds, that of a domestic space and a museum. Walking on polished floors in the Georgian-style building, you’re momentarily transported to a liminal space, a space outside of time. Coming upon the gallery space, the rectangular room is adorned with simple wood panelling and an assortment of small tables from different eras arranged throughout the room, the assemblage of draped and balanced ceramic objects adds to the uncanny feeling evoked by the space, both familiar and alien at the same time. The sculptures are ovoid and organ-like, with fibulae and tubes protruding from grid-patterned forms that are not quite organic, recalling metallics and plastics. The ceramic forms are glazed matte or with a high sheen, and the feeling of unease shifts to anxiety where you’re unsure if you’re standing in a medical refuse facility or an industrial scavenging ground. They may be interpreted as curiosities, their half-familiar forms inviting closer inspection. Without the framework of encased forms behind glass, the ceramics are still arranged for display, inviting the viewer’s gaze.

Glossa (2018) is a long ovoid ceramic shape with two tubes extended, searching for something, the form cradled on a stained pillow as if in a hospice. The object rests on a dresser, yet the uncanny organic form’s placement denotes care and the eerie notes of medical decay, a triage of care for an object past its prime. Although a closer look does not resolve the tension, the broken and deflated forms in the exhibition denote a fragility, a slow decay, whether technological or organic is a matter of perspective.


Susan Low-Beer. Ocellus. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Susan Low-Beer’s ceramics have shifted from figurative to abstract, the forms of Specimen are therefore able to convey anxieties that suffuse our age: from aging to climate disaster and mass waste, but not without a humorous touch. Ocellus (2018) is a ceramic ovoid with two protrusions, once the interior of something either organic or industrial. The dark glaze and purposeful patching elicit the understanding that an object’s lifetime of use has shaped the wear apparent on its surface. Balanced on a half-moon wood plinth with a do-it-yourself aesthetic of rough assembly, the sculpture sits on top of a polished dark wood table, in contrast with the cement blocks it rests on. The stacking of disparate objects adds humour to the display, easing the tension of clear meaning, encouraging the viewer to embrace the absurd. Low-Beer’s sympathetic gestures, of patching and the readymade plinths, are acts of care for the aged techno-organic form. Rather than a nihilistic bent, Low-Beer encourages humour as the connective thread of the world evoked by her work. There are no clear answers or solutions, but rather than seeking a resolute finality of meaning, she invites us to share a collective experience of uncertainty, and maybe even embrace it.

In Mammilla (2018), two ovoid ceramic forms are linked from within, recalling a symbiotic relationship. An act of care, their connection tube is draped over the other form as if in an embrace, while grey matter pools below. The grid-patterned surface and matte grey and blue glaze with overlaid clay seams gesture to the discard of industry, the plea for care of one form to another, and gestures to an organic tableau. The worn and aged surface once again recalls the age of the forms, their original use disguised by their removal from their original context, yet the ceramics show the maker’s hand in their patched forms, clay smoothed over long-mended wounds.

Susan Low-Beer. Mammilla. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Comb-Plate (2018), made of a ceramic ovoid with two protrusions placed on a woodblock, abstractly looks like an automaton that has fallen on the stairs. The absurdist humour contrasts with the disquiet of discard, whether organic or industrial remains unresolved. Wood and metal chairs, concrete slabs, and hollow wood trunks unsettle the observer, creating the tension between the plinth and artwork, to question where the work ends, and the display object begins. The exhibition offers no respite from the disquieting familiarity of objects, at once domestic and commercial, organic and industrial, clay and metal, art and curiosity, humour and absurdity are the common links.

Low-Beer’s ceramics are transformed in every iteration of the exhibition, domestic furniture unique to this iteration of the exhibition, the ovoid forms shifting the understanding of the gallery space they occupy. The tension between discard and decay and the apparent care of mending instills unease in the visitor. Rather than a finite meaning, can we learn to embrace uncertainty and humour as a form of connection? The exhibition prompts us to consider our relationship to objects and ourselves, to consider the ways and circumstances in which we extend care, and what we discard.