In Conversation with Laveen Gammie

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

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

By Dani Neira

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labour Care: A Poem & Conversation with Camila Salcedo

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

By Kalina Nedelcheva

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

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

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

stone-walled to

hear my thoughts;

misshapen and delirious,

though, still here;

at least they’re still here;

What has been your experience with the healthcare system?

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

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

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

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

keep working, still working

still working, keep working;

I feel my body rumble

because of the intensity but

my thoughts are calm;

they must be calm.

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

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

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

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

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

it’s locked away

behind the pain of labour,

a hand reaching out;

still reaching,

keep reaching;

it grasps at the thread of my hope.

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

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

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

in the realm of precarity—

health, is it only for some

and not for others?

how do we decide?

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

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

hope that there is better,

hope that there is care;

what is care?

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

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

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

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

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

In Discussion with Nicole Chaput: Disobedient Women

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

By Naomi Oko

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you expand on the celestial nature of your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Feminist Curating Gaze with Artierranti

Deconstruction of the Patriarchal Art World

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

By Irene Bernardi

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


Can we have a little preview about your next project?

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a Place: In Discussion with Jude Abu Zaineh

Portrait of Jude Abu Zaineh by Kamryn Cusumano. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist-curator working at the intersection of art, food, science, and technology studies, as well as maintaining a neon art practice. As she describes, her work “develops alternate archive practices and investigates themes of culture, displacement, storytelling, diaspora, and belonging, through decolonial and feminist perspectives.” Her bio art process often includes cooking Palestinian meals for community members and analyzing the bacterial culture, through scientific modes in Petri dishes, capturing its decay and shifts over time. 

I first met Jude back in January 2020, shortly after the opening of the group exhibition, Through Clenched Teeth at Forest City Gallery, which included her work entitled Maqlouba | مقلوبة’ featuring multiple orange glowing Petri dishes. Afterward, we all went out to London’s beloved bar, Poacher’s Arms, known for its karaoke rooms and basement vibes. At the time, Jude was near the beginning of her Ph.D. studies, bringing her to upstate New York, which she is now wrapping up. I feel fortunate to have met Jude and follow her practice and accolades at a distance, and grateful for her support of Femme Art Review and building up feminist spaces in a climate that often only shows interest in tearing them down.

Jude speaks more about the heartbreak of the relevancy of her work at this time of political and social aggression towards Palestinians by the Israeli government and military forces, and the cumulation of years of occupation and apartheid rearing its violent head. She discusses Palestinian resiliency and the power of art to foster connection during a time when it’s deeply essential.

Studies in Colour + Flora .Jude Abu Zaineh. 2022-ongoing mixed media in agar, petri dishes Photos by Michael Valiquette.

Your practice is quite interdisciplinary since you work at the intersection of art, food, science, and technology. How did you first discover the connection of working across these disciplines?

I’m an artist first and foremost, but I’m very curious about the sciences. That curiosity drives the way that my mind works when I’m thinking through making artwork and all the things that I’m conceiving creatively that I want to materialize in the world. And then I’m also very food motivated. It just almost seemed like a natural coalescence of art, food, science, and culture. It all just came together when I was doing works that are rooted in bio art or in sci-art, eco-art, where it’s science forward.

I’m approaching a lot of the things that I’m doing in the same way that I’m working through doing something in the kitchen and I’m following a recipe. To me, working out of a lab or a science space is not any different than following a recipe. You have your sets of ingredients, your tools, and your methodology, you’re following a series of steps, and voila, you’re left with whatever the final product or output may be. That was like my introduction to familiarizing myself with these unfamiliar science spaces because I’m an artist working in an interdisciplinary way.

I’m not entering these spaces as someone who’s fully trained and has the language and the technique and all these things. But I’ve built that repertoire over the years. And it’s one of the ways that helped me break down those barriers, almost like my own imposter syndrome of working in these spaces—It’s not any different than me putting something together in my kitchen. Once I break things down that way, in my mind, it makes it more accessible.

Often, I’m talking to people who haven’t come across this idea of bio art or working with food or any of these like biological materials or in a scientific way. In the production of contemporary fine art, I’m breaking it down to almost small bites, (no pun intended). It demystifies how inaccessible science might seem to be and it makes it more accessible to people as viewers, as audiences and to engage with the work. Making all these spaces accessible has also been a driving force in my work. And sometimes it’s just as simple as to distill the work and to talk about it in ways that there’s almost like this universality to the understanding and the language.

Everyone knows how to do something in the kitchen. We all have to eat. So, when you start to mirror these relationships, it just clicks, and it makes sense. I don’t want to invalidate the work that scientists do, and the importance of what they’re doing by kind of bringing it down to this nominal and rudimentary level. But I just think about the context of my work and what I’m doing, and it helps it to be more palatable. And so naturally, the culture and the art and all these things come together very easily, because when I’m working and making these very culturally specific foods, then it just ties everything together.

I love the idea of making it more accessible because there can be a gender imbalance in science and tech as well.  

I think gender imbalances play in all aspects of these spaces. Even just thinking about the domestic sphere when we’re thinking about food and cooking and often where the labor falls and some of these are cultural nuances. It’s just kind of the patriarchy. I think that unfortunately, all of these spaces are gendered, and these disciplines are gendered, but it’s just how we break these barriers and break these boundaries and invite others to join in that change. It’s small changes, but it is overall a collective change over time.

لو يذكر الزيتون غارسهُ، لصار الزيت دمعاً  | If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them…Their Oil would become Tears. Jude Abu Zaineh. Vinyl collage. 34’x 16’. 2022. (after Mahmoud Darwish) Installation shot from solo exhibition, In the Presence of Absence, image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex.

Your 2022 exhibition In the Presence of Absence at the Art Gallery of Windsor [Now Art Windsor-Essex], curated by Noor Alé, explores your relationship with Palestine through archival images, literature, and cultural traditions. Can you speak more about your thought process around this exhibition and how it addresses belonging, diaspora, selfhood, and culture?

I think especially now, in hindsight, given both the political and physical aggressions that are happening in Palestine, I don’t think the work collectively reads that much differently. I just think that their level of potency has changed. It’s a really unfortunate thing for me when my work becomes extremely relevant because of these circumstances. Of course, we all want to make work that’s important and relevant and something [that can] create some meaning and maybe enact some change or whatever it may be. It’s just happening for all the most awful reasons. 

A lot of the pieces in the show were very much about building accessibility and community and thinking about representation and even education about the topic of Palestine, Palestinian identity, and the Palestinian experience, both from my own personal and direct lived experiences as a Palestinian and all the stories that I’ve inherited and carried throughout my life—My family and my lineage and just some of the atrocities that they’ve also directly experienced sort of get passed down. And I was trying to reconcile that relationship with a place that is my home that I connect with on so many levels, yet it is a place that I am exiled from, that my family’s exiled from.

We were forcibly displaced like many Palestinians, it’s unfortunately also a story that’s too common, sadly. And it was a lot of work about that longing for a place that exists that yet feels very out of touch because of all these racial and political boundaries that are so misplaced and so misinformed. It attempted to connect and reconcile that relationship but also invite others in the community who were feeling this sense of home and belonging and longing for a home that once was that may never be.

There is also a lot of nostalgia running through in my practice. I mean, just overall, but I think it was a beautiful opportunity for me to exercise that muscle, which was fun and equally heartbreaking. And I think right now I’m looking at it through this lens of heartbreak because of everything that’s happening.

Hunā wa hunāk (here and there) | هنا و هناك. Jude Abu Zaineh Petri dishes, digital prints 15’ x 18.’ 2022.
Installation shot from solo exhibition, In the Presence of Absence, image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex.

I was particularly excited about one piece in the show, Hunā wa hunāk. I made this series of Petri dishes and put out a call for photographs for people who belong to the diaspora from the Southwest Asian and North African region, to submit any archival photos or photos that meant something to them about their respective homes and families. There is a lot of intersectional understanding and solidarity in terms of these exiled experiences and this hybrid identity of belonging and not belonging to more than one place. That also became this beautiful exercise of building community and sharing stories, and it was very wholesome and healing. All of these things are as equally heartbreaking as they are poetic.

That particular work meant so much to me because it was an invitation to others who are not in the mainstream narrative and especially not in these cultural institutional spaces. It’s not the type of audience who are typically at the forefront and who are represented. It was also very powerful to have people come into the exhibition and become a part of the work. I think it all boils back to what we were talking about earlier with your first question in terms of accessibility and representation.

tend to grow (watermelons). Jude Abu Zaineh. Varying glass tubes and gases, electrodes. 12’ x 30.’2022. Installation shots from group show, She Bends: Redefining Neon Legacy; Museum of Glass, Washington. Photos by Michael Valiquette.

You have recently taken the neon art world by storm. I was wondering if you could expand more about your neon practice and how you reference Palestinian symbols of resistance like watermelons, olive branches, and Arabic calligraphy. What first drew you to neon as a medium?

I’ve always been fascinated by neon as a medium and I’m very tactile. I love the sensory experience of physically making my work and handling my own work. And being involved in the process of making it and understanding the material in every way that I can.  

I think that I was thinking through language, the nuances of language, translations, and failures of translation, especially in the context of the East meets West journey. How again, there are barriers because of language, miscommunications, and misunderstandings. And sometimes in those tensions, there can be something wholesome and very human and a beautiful way to connect. I have made many Arabic calligraphy and text-based works communicating the nuances of language and sometimes like these funny little mishaps that happen in language.

بتهون(الماء بيافا) | Bit-hoon (this too shall pass // Yaffa waterscape) Jude Abu Zaineh. Argon in clear glass tubes, electrodes, transformer, handmade artist frame 36” x 29” x 5”  2023. Installation shot by Michael Valiquette.

The natural progression was that it makes sense to make these pieces that are text-based out of neon because neon at its most basic level is a communicative material. How we engage with it in the public sphere is through signage, and usually, it’s communicating some form of action like, “Come in, We’re Open” or a business name, and it’s usually very tied to capitalism and consumerism. And I love the idea of taking these expectations of a medium and using it to talk about and convey these very intimate and personal experiences that are on the opposite end of the spectrum; it’s not about this commercial usage. It’s like this vulnerability and intimacy that is also being put on display. I just also love the tensions of using that specific medium in this way. 

But neon is a tricky discipline or material to work with because it relies on a mentor and mentee relationship to learn the craft and the practice and hopefully become an expert in some capacity. There’s a big commitment. It’s also historically an industry that is white male dominant. And so, there are also barriers to entry in place in that you can’t just go into an art and craft store and buy the materials and buy the tools that you need and just on a whim start playing around and seeing what happens. It’s not that accessible. Long story short, I knocked on a bunch of doors and I was turned away—It was very frustrating.

I wanted to make the work myself and I couldn’t find someone who would take me on, even as an apprentice or in whatever capacity where I could just go in and do it myself. [I didn’t want to] come up with the idea and pay someone to fabricate it for me. It just felt like such a disconnect from the way that I work and the stories that I was trying to convey in my work.

I ended up going all the way to San Francisco and I was based in Windsor at the time. And now in hindsight, I’m so glad I was so stubborn and didn’t take no for an answer. I just kept trying and trying. Anyway, I ended up meeting this amazing neon bender, Meryl Pataky. She was just a wealth of information and knowledge and was keen about opening her studio doors to someone like me, someone so opposite of what the industry norm is. She’s the co-founder of this collective called She Bends and their whole mandate is to make neon accessible, especially to women and femmes, and people who are typically underrepresented in this discipline and industry.

It’s like the stars weirdly aligned and I got to spend some time with her in San Francisco, learning the basics and trying to figure out my way around this difficult medium. I just couldn’t get enough of it. And I kept at it and kept making work over the years in the space of neon. I’m grateful that I’ve had some amazing experiences since then [with] my work being curated into some shows that are all neon-based. 

I think it’s also like a metaphor and reflective of Palestinian resilience. And the determination in the face of all of these boundaries and barriers like literal apartheid walls and sieges. There’s still this really beautiful display of humanity and resilience and will to do the best you can with what little you have. And to me, neon has been such a reflection of that.

tend to grow (watermelons). Jude Abu Zaineh. Varying glass tubes and gases, electrodes. 12’ x 30.’2022. Installation shots from group show, She Bends: Redefining Neon Legacy; Museum of Glass, Washington. Photos by Michael Valiquette.

Then in terms of actual symbols I’ve been working with, I made this watermelon series in 2022. I’m very proud of this work, but I’m just so sad that it’s even more potent and relevant and needed today. The watermelon is such an important symbol for Palestinians and Palestinian resistance and liberation because the Zionist state has made the Palestinian flag illegal in all of its forms. And so, the watermelon became a stand-in for the Palestinian flag because it represents and mirrors the same colors of the Palestinian flag, red, green, white, and black. Artists and advocates started using the watermelon instead of the Palestinian flag as a symbol for protest advocacy liberation, and all social justice. 

Six months ago, I think it read differently than the work does today, which is also an interesting thing. In arts and culture, meanings are constantly changing. I think the meaning of the watermelon will always be tied to social justice and not just for Palestinians, but again, collective liberation and justice for all the places and all of the people that have been ravaged by imperialism and greed and colonialism and white supremacy and so on.

FORMations, Installation shots from Southwest Seen; Museum London (2023). Photo by Shutter Studios, courtesy of Museum London.

Here in London, your installation FORMations, as part of Southwest Seen, consisted of film stills displayed on the exterior side of Museum London. Can you expand on FORMations and how it reflects the natural ecology of food and flora in the region through Petri dish culture and references to your cultural heritage?

This work was a process response to the lockdown of COVID and everything being in limbo for almost three years. I was kind of in this space of isolation. I was in a new country and program and just felt isolated from all the facets of life and community. One of the ways that I was trying to reconcile that was by going on a lot of walks and trying to familiarize myself with my new homestead in upstate New York.

This was also a response to all the social distancing and all the social isolation that we had to be in because a big part of my practice where I’m making things in Petri dishes revolves around community gatherings around food. I cook and host a traditional Palestinian spread of food for people and that becomes the first part of the process of how I make the Petri dishes. After, I document the growth and decay over time. Then, all those images make their way into these large kaleidoscopic installations, and they manifest and materialize in so many ways beyond that. 

The challenge at the time was replicating that without being able to gather with people. A lot of us turned to a lot of different hobbies and a lot of different things to keep sane during that time. And for me, it was going on a lot of walks. It was solitary and very isolating, but I felt connected to the spaces that I was occupying differently. I was paying a lot more attention to my surroundings. I went urban foraging and gathered whatever things I could find on the sidewalks. I was also thinking about what I was eating and how I could collect, swab, and use my own leftovers and different specimens from around me that I could then corroborate and include in the Petri dish cultures. All of these Petri dishes that I made in the process of creating formations also became like an archival footprint of the specific moment, place, and time. I was spending a few months in upstate New York and then I would go to different parts of Ontario, mostly between Toronto and Windsor and the 401 corridor. All these things that I had gathered made their way into the experimental film that you saw through the building at Museum London from the outside.

I was also very consciously thinking about the work of Ron Benner outside. He has this tended garden, As the Crow Flies. It’s this beautiful, colourful ecosystem and landscape that is right outside this beautiful pristine new building. I was thinking also about a lot of the colors of that natural ecosystem and how can I kind of mirror and reflect that a little bit in the work and see it as in conversation, the inside and the outside, the built environment with the natural environment.

Most recently, you co-curated a show ‘As I Find My Place’ with Farnoosh Talaee at The Next Contemporary, which focuses on personal and collective journeys of exile, migration, and adoption, focusing on placemaking and place(lessness). I was wondering if you could speak more about your process around curating this exhibition and how it first came together.

It was a collaborative effort between me and Farnoosh and it’s all about this feeling of reconciling with reality and all of these awful things that we’re trying to make sense of, politically, geographically, socially. We were trying to find artists who could occupy the space that we knew had the vocabulary of making work that was in dialogue with these collective journeys of exile and thinking about placemaking and placelessness, migration, all of these intense journeys of trying to belong, but also understanding that there’s this not belonging that’s thrust on many of us going through these experiences.

I feel like I have such a responsibility when I’m wearing my curator hat. What are the stories, people, and dialogues that we need to see that we’re not hearing enough of? I think those are questions that are constantly going through my mind and that I’m constantly grappling with. I think as an artist, and as a curator, I’m always thinking through how we break down these barriers and how we let more and more people in. I know for Farnoosh, that’s an important thing for her too, and in her space at The Next Contemporary she’s very deliberate about curating very thoughtful shows that touch on all these things in that representation is important in an intersectional way. Right from the [start], we were kind of speaking the same language and thinking about it similarly. There’s a responsibility to what we’re doing and that was at the forefront of this project.

We have a beautiful roster of artists [Participating artists include Ibrahim Abusitta, Hiba Abdallah, Saks Afridi, asmaa al-issa, Basil AlZeri, Nuveen Barwari, Rehab Nazzal, Parvin Peivandi, Maya Perry, and Larissa Sansour] and they’re all engaging with these topics in different ways with different material explorations and bringing their own respective histories and personal experiences about these feelings of longing and belonging and exile. Both the installation of the works, but also the power of each of these artists’ works individually and as a collective—it’s so powerful.

You can check out more of Jude Abu Zaineh’s work on her website and Instagram.

The Queer Electronic Dream of Dinah! The Album & Film

Dinah Thorpe. Dinah! performance and film at Array Space. Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Kalina Nedelcheva

In the quaint Array Space at 155 Walnut Avenue, Toronto-based queer electronic musician Dinah Thorpe performed Dinah! alongside a film which interprets each one of the 17 songs on the album.

Throughout the performance, Thorpe established a synergy between the ebbs and flows of her delicate voice, which sometimes accompanied and at other times contrasted the unpredictable urgency of the instrumentals and the visual language of the film. The cinematography oscillated between the abstract and the everyday, juxtaposing texture and shadow play with experiences of living and navigating the urban environment. Some shots—such as the interpretive dance by collaborator Patricia Allison framed by trees, fallen leaves, and a busy street in the background—were endearing; others were eerie and confrontational. For example, Thorpe presents documentation of the fences and signs that the City of Toronto put up as part of its efforts to remove homeless individuals from park encampments. The sequence and the lyrics of this track remind us of the protests, policing, and the demand for safe spaces for vulnerable citizens that have been going on since January 2021. The beats and lyrics reflected these narratives, shifting between a calming lullaby and heavier, industrial prowess. The experience of Dinah! blends a sense of immediacy and a softness particular to queer identities. The rhythm kept listeners grounded throughout and the artist’s commitment to activist causes was clear and decisive—Thorpe concluded her performance in a tee proudly claiming: “PRIDE IS ABOLITIONIST.”

I had the opportunity to chat with the artist before the Dinah! release show where she elaborated on the creative process for this album and film.

Dinah! album portrait. Photo by Janet Kimber. 

K: Can you tell us about the journey of creating your upcoming album, “Dinah!”? How did the process differ from your previous albums (considering the pandemic context)?

D: It’s hard to talk about the whole process because it spanned for so many years. I always write alone and that didn’t change during the pandemic. But it was a different kind of isolation than experienced in previous artistic work. There was the context of panic and also not being able to go see art in person or be within artist communities outside of Zoom. I got a ukulele bass and a sequencer/sampler, which has helped me make beats in a new way. I felt like these two instruments kept me afloat in the pandemic. With no shows on the horizon, I could concentrate on just writing and not think as much about how to show things in a live context. A lot of the beats in the new album are from that beat machine and practicing for the launch of Dinah!, made me realize that I ended up playing bass on more than half the songs.  

K: How did this period of isolation impact your relationship with your voice and your approach to music-making?

D: It impacted everything—both the content and the structure of the songs. I feel like the things that I was writing about changed. And you know, there’s a particular structure that emerged where it’s sort of quiet and then it’s full-on panic, like a dense, fast panic. I’m not doing that structure anymore, so it feels like a particular pandemic song structure. I also started writing more instrumentals during that period of isolation. I think that was the result of not knowing what to say at all and finding it easier to translate things musically and not lyrically.

K: Your music has been described as “home to both the emotional and the physical.” How did you balance these elements in Dinah!, and what was your creative process like in achieving that balance?

D: As you know, dance parties were not a thing for such a long time and maybe still are not the easiest thing to go to COVID-wise and so, I started dancing more in my studio. I’m not a dancer, but I found that when I would do exercise videos, I’d also have a dance party. I also found myself more drawn to making dancier music. It was such a particular time for the body, remember? I don’t mean to say it’s over for folks but just acknowledging this scary, intense time for the body. At the same time, your body was trapped in one place. I guess I started using my body in different ways. I started doing a lot more yoga in the pandemic which changed my singing; it made me a better singer, which was not part of the plan. It just happened. Moving my body in these new ways helped me have a little bit more of an integrated practice for myself.

Now, I’m moving towards performance that involves lip-syncing, dance, and stripping, which is a whole other direction of embodiment. My practice had to become more integrated during the pandemic because my studio was the place where I could do things with my body when all the other things I usually did—like basketball, for example—were not available. And now, I am taking a cardio dance party class which is humiliating because I can’t keep up. But it’s teaching me to move my body in different ways and I am curious if that will make a difference in my work.


Dinah Thorpe. Dinah! performance and film at Array Space. Photo courtesy of the artist.

K: Your album features a “dynamic frisson,” with starts and stops that seem to mirror the unpredictability of the past couple of years. Can you speak to how you captured this sense of propulsion and tension throughout the album?

D: So, I love a wall of sound—like, I totally love a wall of sound and songs that do that well in all kinds of genres, not just in electronic music but also in band and classical music. I also really love singing quietly and with lots of layers of harmony in a way that you can hear the different parts. And I love bringing those things together, like having a wall of sound and having 10 vocal tracks with harmonies at the same time. The songs in Dinah! reflect the time of the pandemic because it was a very quiet time and a very introspective time, but it was also a time of utter panic and chaos internally. The wall of sound and the more folky, lyrical quietness ended up co-existing in some cases. I find it interesting to try to put them next to each other and see if I can make a coherent narrative that contains both. In some structures, I also like to do an arc where it’s a slow build, slow build, explode, and then the end.

Dinah! Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

K: Have you ever thought about your songs as lullabies?

D: I think that I aspire to write a lullaby but I’m not sure that I would be able to write a lullaby and then not throw something else in to wake the baby up at the end, you know?

K: Maybe it’s not a traditional lullaby but a queer lullaby. Like, wake up to the world and your identity!

D: Totally! Or like songs of queer seduction…the seduction of sleep, the seduction of sex.

K: How do you define queer seduction?

D: Well, I can’t speak for the audience, but people reflect to me that that’s been their experience of a show. I enjoy it when that happens because that’s my memory of going to inspiring concerts. You can’t figure out whether you want to be with them or sleep with them at the end, right? For me, all those early concert experiences were with queer musicians. I mean, I hope I engender that in people too but that’s also weird. Like, it’s this weird thing we project onto artists, right? It’s partly that music is very seductive when people are good at it.

But the other side effect of being a musician for me is that sex can’t involve music in any way because I am too involved in it, and I will check out of the thing that’s going on and pay more attention to the music. I feel kind of jealous of people who can set the perfect vibe by putting on music. Occupational hazard, I guess.

Dinah Thorpe. Dinah! performance and film at Array Space. Photo courtesy of the artist.

K: As an activist and athlete, how do you see your identity intersecting with your music, particularly in the realm of queer alt-electronic music? How does your personal journey inform the themes and messages in your songs?

D: All of the pieces that you’re talking about, like the piece of me that plays basketball and organizes basketball community and the piece of me that organizes for Palestinian liberation, which I’m involved in as much as I can be, make their way into my work. There is a track on the record about helping unhoused folks who are being violently evicted from a park by the police, for example. These pieces are just who I am. They inform my work in that way and vice versa; it just gives me the strength to do other work that I do that’s hard. I’m interested in doing activism in different ways. There’s the sort of obvious way of participating in marches and there are less obvious ways like delivering food to people who need it. I don’t mean to say that I’m doing everything on the activist spectrum, but I like to engage locally and be aware of horrendous global events to try and figure out how to make change happen.

Dinah! Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

I think everyone should be involved in this stuff. As artists, it is our job to look around and see what’s happening. In this sense, we are even more responsible because our job is to observe and reflect. Being an artist, a queer, an activist, and being an anti-capitalist and an anti-racist are all a part of me, and I don’t know that I can say which caused which. If you’re an artist, you’re likely living inside a system where you don’t get paid for your work so presumably that would make you identify with other people who don’t get paid for their work, right? And maybe you also recognize that other people do way harder work than you that they get paid badly for.

I want to be in community and a big way that I have found to be in community is through activism. And I feel like once you have a sense of how messed up things are, then there is no choice but to try to do something about it.

K: What do you hope listeners will take away from experiencing your music?
D: I always think of music as company and as therapy. It’s the thing that you put on while you’re making dinner and maybe you wiggle a bit, or it helps you through your day. I don’t know, it helps you with boring chores. And then the more active pieces are the emotions. I think we’ve probably all had the experience where we’re having a feeling, maybe we don’t even know what the feeling is, and then suddenly we’re listening to the perfect song for that feeling. Maybe the song causes us to dance down the street or to suddenly bawl our eyes out. I do this work in order to work through things and I hope my music works this way for other people, as well.  

K: Can you tell us a little bit about the film you made to go with your record?

D: It’s been a fun, interesting, and difficult project. I think working more in film partly came from the pandemic. There is a video for every song. I wasn’t sure how the film would be as a whole since there are 17 songs but having finished it, I think it does cohere; there are themes and a pace to it. So, you can experience the album by listening to it or you can experience the album by listening to it and watching the videos at the same time. It’s funny, at the very end of the project, I thought, why did I do this to myself? But I just wanted it to exist.

You can find more of Dinah’s music on her website and Bandcamp.

Cycles of Longing: In Conversation with Rima Sater and Laura Acosta

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Interview by Adi Berardini

“Can you ever fall short when you’re longing?” the voice echoes in the expanded film You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion on view at Forest City Gallery by Rima Sater, a Lebanese-Canadian artist based in London, ON, and Laura Acosta, a Colombian-Canadian artist based in Montreal, Quebec.

While I view the film projected onto the floor with a water tank placed overtop, I feel like I’m peering down over a cliff ledge with midnight blue water surrounding me. As the artists describe, the film is what they’ve coined a piece of troppy sci-fi, with a nostalgic yet futuristic feel; the tropical landscape is often superimposed on the figure so that they become a chameleon to their surroundings. The film looks at feelings of alienation and invisibility, diasporic longing for a place, and the bittersweetness that is inherent in this experience. You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion also explores the maternal and intergenerational trauma of displacement, a topic that echoes deeply at a time when over 1.5 million Palestinians are facing forced displacement from Gaza and a genocide by Israeli forces.

“No matter how displaced you feel someone is feeling similarly,” the voice in the film rings, at times distorted, with the type of ‘70s music you may hear in an infomercial. Desire is multi-faceted, not solely reserved for a person, but for a place, for a home. As the narrator also states, “There is no pain that lasts a hundred years or a body that can sustain it.” 

In this interview, Rima Sater and Laura Acosta discuss their collaboration, the process of working on the film and exhibition You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion, and the accompanying writing workshop. 

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

What first brought you together to collaborate on this film and exhibition?

Rima: Laura and I have been friends for a very long time, and we first collaborated in 2015.

She was doing a residency at the FOFA Gallery at Concordia and invited me. Long story short, we did this other residency together and we had a sound and performance piece that was about this character that we made up named Iris Breeze. It had a lot of big philosophical questions about this woman daydreaming and similar themes to what we had introduced into this piece as well. I got into this residency in Brazil, and then reached out to Laura and asked if she wanted to come. Then we ended up going together, and it just happened. I [figured] I’d bring some film, and Laura brought some textiles and costuming. We both had things we’d been writing about and wanted to use for something. It came together organically and became this film piece. 

And then it wasn’t until we [thought that] maybe we should apply for a show that we figured out how to put it all together. It made sense. Everything just fit together and fell into place so naturally.

Laura: I think Rima and I have an overlapping interest in creating this surreal world out of real life, which is this tendency to want to daydream and have escapist fantasies. I think we both have a similar way that we deal with pain or anxiety, which is through absurdity and humour.

Our friendship is based on this ongoing banter where an image will get so absurd to the point where it’s like just a completely different world from real-life experiences. In our close friendship and being two brown women who grew up with immigrant parents, we have such a similar upbringing and similar experiences of alienation that humor is a way for us to explore all of this through absurdity is where our work overlaps. Even that first collaboration that we did together [had] this tropical feeling. Like how to go on vacation, escapism, and creating grandiose ways of thinking of how to live this tropical luxury life while demonstrating this sort of dissatisfaction with reality, flipping it on its head and making it our own through humor and surrealism.

Rima: A lot of our conversations when we’re together or apart, you could take any of it and turn it into a script. Nothing that we wrote was inauthentic to the things that we were feeling or what we’d say to each other. It’s almost like transcribing a text thread between the two of us. It would be how we make these connections and play on words. We have this kind of like téte a téte thing where one of us says one thing, and then the other person makes a joke out of it based on one word from that thing. Then it just evolves, but it always comes full circle in the end. It’s funny and ridiculous but rooted in sorrow.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

The film explores themes of belonging and alienation of foreign bodies referencing sci-fi. Can you speak further about the meaning and inspiration for the film?

Laura: At the time, for some reason, I remember we were at the Covent Garden Market, and we were talking about our mothers and this idea of how there’s this normalized sense of suffering that they have. And that’s where the Arabic saying came about that Rima brought up, “You can’t have honey without an onion.”

Rima: My mom said it one day to me in Arabic very loosely. And I was like, I love that. In Arabic, there are a lot of idioms, but they also play on words of each other and there’s a lot of rhyming. It’s these little cheeky things that I’ve been learning as I grow up as well. And that one just stood out to me so much because it’s so simple. It’s just like, yeah, you can’t have honey without an onion. It makes so much sense.

Our relationship to this matriarchal pain comes through with just being inherently born in the cultures that we’re born in and being women.

Laura: And then there’s the counterpart to it from Colombia that was, “There’s no pain that lasts a hundred years or a body that can sustain it.”

We’re thinking about these sayings a lot and this idea of maternal lineages. And I think we were almost talking about how we have this sorrow that isn’t ours sometimes. Like we were just kind of born with it. Our relationship to this matriarchal pain comes through with just being inherently born in the cultures that we’re born in and being women.

That unfolded into a larger theme of alienation because that’s our situated knowledge, but we want to make work that appeals to all types of experiences. Under the system that we live in, we’re all living with alienation. We’re all so separated and not comfortable with who we are, it’s not made for people like us to be comfortable.

Laura: Then Rima had this residency in Brazil lined up and she invited me to it, and at the time I was playing with sort of reflective textiles, and so we thought, okay, why don’t we speak about the idea of visibility, belonging [and] not belonging, through a visual sort of story, and then obviously, Rima has all the knowledge of capturing image with different formats, so it became a play on where to put these bodies inside these landscapes.

We went to an island in Brazil, so it was all very tropical, in line with what we were talking about before. And then it became this conversation about what bodies are visible, what bodies are invisible, and what it inherently means to be human, to feel alienated without even knowing what you’re alienated from.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Rima: And I think just the word alien lends to the sci-fi theme as well. Sci-fi [films] are so absurd but also incredible since they predict a lot of things. There are so many movies that have predicted certain technologies, so they’re also very modern at the same time as being this sort of strange, otherworldly thing.

We coined a term, “Troppy sci-fi,” which was the genre we decided to put this film under, and with our work in general, it made sense with what we were doing. It had a bit of this otherworldly sort of aspect to it. I think that when we were writing our parts, and we collaborated and put them together, with self-reflection as well, [we thought] where did these emotions come from? Where do these things stem from? 

And not to be psychoanalytical, but also just thinking maybe this happened when I was a kid, or this is what I learned, or thinking about things that your parents had gone through and maybe how that imprinted on you and led [and influenced] your experiences and the way that you react to stuff.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Your exhibit is very immersive and references water with the dark blue walls, lighting, and water tank over the film screening. Can you speak more about the symbol of water? It lends itself well to tropical sci-fi, having the water over the film too. Was it difficult logistically? 

Rima: It’s the simplest of all the ideas that we had. We really wanted to honor the water because we were on an island, and we were just surrounded by water and there were waterfalls everywhere.

It was just like a very symbolic element to our experience at the residency, so we wanted to make sure that it was part of the piece as well. We were like, “Oh, maybe we’ll do a waterfall wall,” we just had all these ideas. And then one day, I was home, and we were like, “What about like a pool?”

And we [thought] “This is great. Let’s do a pool.” So, she came over and we went into my bathtub and filled it up and took my projector and made sure that it made sense. So then from there, we had this box fabricated and waterproofed when we were in Halifax. And it was so simple otherwise, but so effective. It translates into the film and how there are different perspectives within itself, as well as how people can view the content.

Laura: The water is meant to represent many things, but more and more the piece feels like this daydream that we’ve been trying to describe, even from our first piece with Iris Breeze, this feeling of being so inside your head.

Having everything blue and with water lights and an underwater feeling, I equate it with the subconscious. Even as we’re talking now, it’s making me reflect on our friendship and the importance of female friendships is how much therapy you give to each other, it’s unbelievable. It is like full therapy sessions where your one experience can be dissected into everything your family represents, your entire experience of who you are.

I think more and more about this piece, and the text that Sandi Rankaduwa wrote, which is a gorgeous piece of writing. It took me more to this place that it’s not meant to be an outdoor place, it feels like being inside a daydream or a subconscious state.

Rima: At the Khyber, we both visualized it as being its own thing that you could immerse yourself in and get lost in it too because you have the lights reflecting all around you that emulate the water and then the water within itself. But being there, it was also trying to make it like this calming and reflective experience at the same time, as well as addressing these heavier topics. A lot of people have seen the piece and been like, I feel like I just went through a therapy session, reflecting on their own experiences with the themes that we had.

So having it at FCG (Forest City Gallery) and having it in this very perfect little box, gives it more of that feeling of “I’m in here. I have to be with this, and I have to be with myself, and I have to be with my thoughts.” The more we do it, or the more time that passes, different things stand out. It’s amazing how it’s evolved.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Can you speak more about the writing workshop and what inspired you to do a workshop as well?

Laura: The workshop came about because the Khyber was interested in community engagement. Shout out to the Khyber, they’re doing cool stuff over there and making sure that the community is reflected in what’s happening inside the space and it’s part of everything that’s happening in the space.

They [asked how we would want] to do a community engagement exercise. And we started talking about the process that we have towards creating our work, which starts with this conversation, a banter, and then this production of a score in a way. And that score becomes the starting point for images or for movement or whatever we come up with.

Then we came up with fun exercises for a group of people to write a story together. We also didn’t know what the outcome of that was going to be, which was cool because you get people’s prompts and then see how people explore their personal experiences, but through a playful way and in a group setting.

Rima: The prompts [encourage] you to reflect on your experiences with the themes of alienation, belonging, and grief, anything we cover in our work, then write down a sentence, a word, just anything that comes to mind. Then we just rip it all up and put it into a little hat or bucket anonymously. And then from there, you pick stuff out like this Mad Libs game. 

When we did the workshop this time around, because we had two separate groups, we noticed that both of us had done it a little bit differently but still stuck within the same theme. For example, we did like the who, what, where, when, why, and sometimes how. You’d pick something out and then ask everybody, “Where do you think this fits in?” [From there] you write that down and then have everyone describe that and elaborate on it a little bit more. Then we differentiate between sound bite and narration and eventually turn it into something that could be a script.

Everyone loves it because it’s collaborative and writing can be so personal. Even though people were writing very personal things, deconstructing it in a way that was a bit absurd or silly but also very profound, allowed people to enjoy it more and see the different ways in which writing can take forms.

Laura: That’s the beautiful thing about collaboration. When it’s non-hierarchical, there’s no leader. Then you slowly start seeing what role each person takes. Some people speak more, other people like to take a moment and say something when they feel it’s right. And then as the story starts unfolding, you can see it start turning on in their heads, and they start creating more stuff. It’s a cool experience because also we never know what’s going to come out of it.  

You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion was on view at Forest City Gallery from January 6th to February 17th, 2024.

An Interview with Raha Javanfar: Sympathy for the Devil

On theatre, moving hearts, and rock’n’roll

Raha Javanfar performing as part of Sympathy for the Devil at Soulpepper Theatre. Photo by Camille Ng, courtesy of the artist.

By Alexia Bréard-Anderson

I sink into a velvet-lined seat in the centre of the audience, holding my breath as the overhead lights dim at Soulpepper Theatre. The air around us is thick with anticipation as silhouetted musicians step onstage to take their place among a myriad of scattered instrument stands, a grand piano, and tangled microphone cables. We hear a whispered one-two-three and BAM! We’re hit with a thunderous explosion of power chords, a relentless jumpstart into a spectacular theatrical journey of the Devil throughout music history.

Adorned in sequined pants and a feathered jacket, Raha Javanfar embodies the rebellious spirit of rock’n’roll, slamming her guitar in the opening medley of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ alongside the striking Juno-nominated vocalist SATE and a stellar crew of bandmates whose creative synergy casts an otherworldly glow on the stage.

With intricate compositions of the Baroque era to headbanging heavy metal riffs and everything in between, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ plunges us into a realm of art and darkness, an exhilarating musical tribute to the eternal allure of the Devil.

Born in Iran and based in Toronto, the brilliant multi-instrumentalist, artist, and theatre designer takes us backstage to discuss her creative process, background, and influences.

Raha Javanfar headshot. Photo by Zahra Saleki, courtesy of the artist.

Alexia: Your creative practice is so incredibly diverse. You’re an artist, you play multiple instruments, and you’ve performed, written, and designed many theatre plays. Tell us about your journey: where did it all begin? How does it all connect?

Raha: I grew up with classical music training that taught me a lot early on in life: practice, discipline, rigor. But it wasn’t all for me during my youth, particularly my teenage years. I craved anarchy and something messier… so I gravitated towards theatre. That’s not to say that discipline and rigor don’t exist in theatre, of course they do. But my young mind perceived more ‘play’ in making plays than music at the time. I ended up pursuing a post-secondary education in theatre production, which is how I became a lighting designer. But I’ve always been restless in my art and eager to widen my horizons and extend my practice in all directions.

I brought music back into my life through playing in rock and country bands and eventually started to make a place for myself in the Toronto music scene. Because I was so connected to both music and theatre, many theatre artists began extending invitations for me to participate in their projects as a musician. Anyway, on and on it went, and I’m lucky to have collaborated with so many genius artists throughout the years, all of whom I have learned more from than I could ever quantify.

Time and time again, we witness the pressure placed on artists to be ‘coherent’ and easily ‘categorizable’… to follow a predetermined path towards success or recognition that prioritizes profit over soul. One glance at Raha’s multiple bands – from playing the fiddle in the Western Swing Band The Double Cuts to being the front-woman bassist and vocalist of Maple Blues Award nominee blues/R&B band Bad Luck Woman & Her Misfortunes – reveals a nonchalant resistance to this – and how often the antidote to this is to be in community with others, to create and witness artistic expression together.

Raha Javanfar and SATE. Sympathy for the Devil at Soulpepper Theatre, 2023. Photo by Camille Ng, courtesy of the artist.

I was absolutely blown away by ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ which you created and directed the music for. Can you talk about how it came to fruition? Did the Devil come to you in a dream?

‘Sympathy for the Devil’ is not quite your usual ‘concert’ in the traditional sense and not quite a play. We call them docu-concerts at Soulpepper, which is a format that was started by long-time Soulpepper Slaight Music Director, Mike Ross. I’ve had the honour of performing in several of these concerts and it was a thrill to create one of my own. To be honest, the idea was a seed that was planted years ago, and I barely remember how I came up with it. I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Paganini being accused of having sold his soul to the devil to be the greatest violinist. And of course, there is Robert Johnson too. Those two stories, along with my love for the Devil Went Down to Georgia were enough to catapult me into the creation of this entire show.

Sympathy for the Devil at Soulpepper Theatre, 2023. Photo by Camille Ng, courtesy of the artist.

‘Sympathy for the Devil’ has a unique energy that echoes an impromptu, late-night jam session with friends. The chemistry fostered by everyone in the cast was infectious. As Music Director, what was the process of bringing these performers together, and how has it differed from past plays you’ve participated in?

If there’s one thing I did truly right on this project, it’s the people I picked to work with. The musicians in the band are extremely gifted and more importantly, generous with their art and creativity. I spent a lot of time in advance arranging the numbers. We had a workshop last summer with some of the same (but also some different) musicians during which time I had the opportunity to try out some of the arrangements and finesse them. It’s lovely to hear that it gives the energy of a late-night jam session because, to be honest, the process was anything but! Unfortunately, the rehearsal schedule for these shows leaves very little room for collaboration or ‘jamming.’ I had to arrive with a very specific plan in mind. But of course, there were many moments in which something was missing, or something didn’t feel quite right, and the band contributed their musicality to filling some of those gaps.

‘Sympathy for the Devil’ presents a stellar cast of performers including Brooke Blackburn, Rebecca Hennessy, SATE, Jenie Thai, Neil Brathwaite, Naghmeh Farahmand, Michelle Josef, and Royce Rich: whose rendition of Giuseppe Tartini’s ‘The Devil’s Trill’ was the most goosebump-inducing solo violin performance I’ve ever witnessed.

In addition to your kaleidoscope of artistic pursuits, you’re also an educator. You teach violin, piano, and music theory both privately and in different schools, as well as lighting design at Toronto Metropolitan University. What drew you to teaching, and what’s your favourite part about passing on the knowledge?

I love teaching. This year, I had to pass on the TMU teaching position because I was too busy with this show. But I feel like I always gain so much from any opportunity to educate others on the arts. Perhaps it sounds selfish, but the truth is that I learn so much from teaching that it’s always worth pursuing it for my own betterment and development. Kids, especially, are so open-minded and open-hearted. It is so fulfilling to see them absorb everything and send it forward.

Sympathy for the Devil at Soulpepper Theatre, 2023. Photo by Camille Ng, courtesy of the artist.

We’re in such a pivotal moment in time. Amidst so much destruction, rage, and despair… we’re witnessing movements for peace and justice across the globe that remind us how much everything is truly connected. For you, what role does music play within it all?

Not just music, but the arts in general, are the only way I know how to wrap my head around anything. I’m not a religious or spiritual person, and sometimes when there’s so much darkness, it’s hard knowing where to find light. For me, it’s always in books, poetry, music, and art. A single piece of art can help express all the complicated feelings that so many of us have about the world. At the same time, it can bring people together. It can remind us about the humanity that exists in each one of us. It can challenge us to think in different ways. In a world where we’re all so divided, I know it’s impossible for a piece of music or theatre to change anybody’s mind. But it’s definitely possible for it to move their hearts, and sometimes that’s enough.

What’s on your radar? What spaces, people, and projects are blowing your mind?

The incredible Toronto music scene. There are so many gems in this city… Drom Taberna and the Cameron House have lots of great stuff bubbling out of both every night of the week. So many music venues have done a great job surviving the pandemic and continuing to provide opportunities to Toronto musicians. The Drom Artists Collective is a group of extremely talented and wonderful people, who are putting out all sorts of cool stuff. And I know it sounds super biased, but I’m very excited about all that Soulpepper Theatre continues to do, particularly the docu-concert series!

What’s on the horizon for you once ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ closes?

I’ll be turning my attention back to my band, Bad Luck Woman & Her Misfortunes. I’m also performing in the next Soulpepper concert, On A Night Like This, as well as co-creating a concert called Ladies of the Canyon that will be premiering at Soulpepper this spring.

Sympathy for the Devil is showing at Soulpepper Theatre until November 26, 2023.  You can follow Raha’s projects on her website and Instagram.

Taking care but letting go: A Conversation with Jagoda Dobecka

Where are the worlds that flowers long for? Local Memorial Fest, Bródno Sculpture Park, Warsaw, Kacper Szalecki and Frajda Natychmiast performing The story of two flowers growing on opposite banks of the river, photo by Wojtek Kaniewsk.

By Juliane Foronda

Pansies, friendship bracelets, karaoke, and shared meals all function as gentle tethers into the tender practice of Polish artist Jagoda Dobecka. Based in Wrocław, and a current PhD candidate at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Dobecka’s work deals with notions surrounding loss, grief, memory, and nostalgia. With a commitment to gathering being a strong pillar in her work, she often invites the public to join her in planting a garden, sing sad songs, or come and cook nostalgic dishes together.

Jagoda’s practice has this beautiful way of making you laugh just as much as it will make you cry. I often find myself smirking through tears whenever I’m fortunate enough to experience her work in person. The courage to choose the path of vulnerability often goes unacknowledged in a world where softness isn’t always seen as a strength. Her work challenges the norms of hierarchy, patriarchy, accessibility, and most other social conventions in manners that may appear so obvious or simple, but are laced with layers of consideration, comfort, and care the more that the works unfold and let you in.

This conversation sheds light on how much we can learn from our surroundings, the importance of saving others from loneliness, and the necessity of community. Her work is a reminder that much like flowers, strings, songs, and food, we can be something more when we’re united—we are stronger together than we are apart.

Juliane: Can you explain why you make work and what your practice is about?

Jagoda: I am creating or building temporary safe spaces where people can exchange their experiences and emotions. These can be performative events such as dinners, karaoke, or meetings to make a garden together. The important factor of those events is participation and encouraging the guests to take part. Materially, I mostly work with text, food, and plants. This is the framework that I’m using to talk about and share the painful experiences that are connected with loss, grief, nostalgia, and longing. I feel that we can sometimes censor ourselves and we don’t want to share those experiences with other people for different reasons, and I thought that it could be helpful to have that kind of space to talk about stuff and feel a sense of community.

To you, what makes for a safe space?

As the host, I think a lot about the space and its arrangement. I like open spaces such as gardens and parks that often have good connotations and some significance to the project itself. I also consider what guests might expect and what they might be willing to give. I’m just building a frame, which is very easy to build again. For a performative dinner, I bring the table, chairs, and food and invite people to come together. I try to be cautious and observant and to make people who are participating feel comfortable. At some point, I think I’m also trying to be invisible and let visitors hold the space as they are. I’m just starting it, but then other people are kind of doing whatever they want with it. It’s a lot about taking care of the whole situation, but also letting go.

Roots of Community, performative dinner in collaboration with Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew, sessi.space, Brno, photo by Polina Davydenko.

Do you see the guests, in a sense, like materials in your work?

Both yes and no. I started making this type of work quite recently so after almost each event, I interview the people. If I know them already, I can text them afterward and ask questions about their experience and their overall feelings. I’m also trying to be critical and see how people are interacting with the whole situation and get their feedback on it. It’s an important part of my research to listen to people and what they have to say about the whole experience. It’s usually positive stuff, but sometimes people complain or say that they didn’t feel so good when something happened. It’s priceless to have that sort of feedback and to see how I can navigate that next time and consider what to change. During the actual events, I don’t think I have ever seen them as material.

Speaking of research, what do you think the purpose of your artistic research is right now? What are you currently working on, and what has led you to this point?

I was in this moment in life when I felt that everything collapsed, and I really needed some support. Then I realized that there are plenty of people like me out there. I thought that maybe I could somehow create, as I said, this frame, where we can meet and talk about things and just have nice experiences of being together. The events are open to everyone, so whoever comes is welcome to participate and become a part of this temporary community. The range of personas is wide. I know that bonds were created during these events as people got to know each other. I call it temporary, but it doesn’t have to be.

It’s not something special I’m doing. Most of these things happen anyway in life: people already meet and have dinners, sing songs, and read books together. Since I work in the arts, I was also thinking about the institutional and non-institutional context in relation to the types of events I have. Every art institution is talking about care, how they should be more open and more welcoming, and asking a lot of questions about how to do this. I wanted to see if it’s possible to build this space within an institutional context. I’ve made a lot of events myself or worked with artist-run spaces or more independent spaces, but then I also did a few events with art institutions, and I can see the difference. I think that the art institution has stiffness within its structure. It also translates into the events since people are less…open, or less free, or whatever.

Do you see a big difference in the demographic or groups of people that would come to maybe more of an ad-hoc or DIY event versus one that’s run more formally with a museum or another institution?

Yeah, one difference is that I see many more elderly people coming to institutions. I think the reason for this is that many artist-run spaces, especially in Poland, don’t have such a long lifespan. They usually exist for two or three years, and then they die, so these spaces also attract younger people who are usually the ones who are showing in, curating, and creating them.

Friendship bracelet, 2022, photo Piotr Blajerski.

I know you have a background in painting. Can you speak more about how you consider your materials and media in your current practice?

I do have a background in painting, which I think I suppress the more that I focus on other things that I’m more interested in. I can divide my practice into two parts when considering materials. One part is the participatory events. I bring food, karaoke, plants, or texts from books – the meeting is the material. Then there’s this other aspect to my practice where I like to create objects or just interdisciplinary works that could be more traditionally exhibited. For example, I made this huge friendship bracelet, which was three meters long. I wanted to recreate the friendship bracelets that many of us used to make when we were kids as a sort of statement, but also a monument for those relationships that we had when we were young. I got really invested in finding the perfect ropes.

I don’t feel that attached to any material or medium. I think that a very strong basis for my work is text. Making notes or writing things that happened to me. I was recently introduced to automatic writing, which is great. After you experience something, you just write for 10 minutes – whatever comes to your head. It’s like a nice source of raw material that you can use.

Where are the worlds that flowers long for? Local Memorial Fest, Bródno Sculpture Park, Warsaw, Wake Karaoke, photo by Wojtek Kaniewski.

It appears the concept tends to inform the material(s). I also wanted to talk about how a lot of your work deals with grief and the themes that surround it. Do you see grief as inspiration, or what’s your relationship with grief in relation to your work?

I think it’s similar to what you asked about the people who are participating in my events, I see grief as both a material and an inspiration.

I experienced grief, and I’m still experiencing it. And I know that every person who is dealing with this topic also has their own experience as well. I know that each experience is very different; it’s not the same for everyone. It really is both the material and inspiration in one since my own experience of it acts as a material in a sense, but I am also inspired by seeing grief in a broader context where I can just see that it is a loss in a more general sense. What’s the difference between grief and longing? I’m just thinking about those things and how it all binds together. I think grief is a material inspiration.

I think one thing I’ve always found quite special about your practice is how you don’t shy away from heavier topics (such as grief), but, at least from my experience of your work – it doesn’t consume it. You pull in quite nostalgic things to offer a different perspective.

Yeah, I feel like this wasn’t a fully conscious decision to use these nostalgic elements, I think it was just purely subconscious.

Then is it a bit of your personal way of coping?

Probably. The thing with nostalgia is that it is also a sort of loss. And I’m very heavy into nostalgia. I’m nostalgic about all the things and it’s sometimes embarrassing, but I’m really that person who remembers things like games and snacks from when we were younger with a deep fondness. Nostalgia is a loss of sorts, but it’s maybe a bit lighter, or at least within a broader recognition of loss. Nostalgia is emotionally lighter than grief so maybe it’s just preparation for the heavier topics. We can first face the nostalgia to see the comfort in loss. As I said, it’s not something that was really intentional, but it might work as this sort of blanket that you’re wearing to feel safer as you see that things are going away.

It could also be about accessibility. I think this sort of juxtaposition of karaoke, for example, which is a really fun activity that we do with friends to have a good time, but then we’re doing grieving karaoke which is all sad songs about dying, loss, and grief. So, we kind of have both because we settle into the party activity, but with those popular songs that are extremely sad and heavy (because I usually use well-known pop songs), so everything feels kind of like a party.

Thinking about accessibility, maybe it also helps to make it a less scary topic than some people could perceive. I interviewed some of the guests taking part in the grieving karaoke and they said that at some point they felt extremely good and safe being surrounded, and they had this desire to do something festive. After they started singing Viva Forever by Spice Girls, they began to cry as they thought about all kinds of teenage memories and other thoughts came back, like losing their first love. They said that it was so strong emotionally, but at the same time, they felt good because they were with people.

For a recent project, I wrote a script for a performance, which is based on a legend with a dragon, witch, and magic potion. It has the framework of a school theater play, which is not too serious. However, it also talks about more difficult things like a tragic death, grief, being stuck in a cluster of cultural expectations, and being in a toxic relationship. I guess I use nostalgia to open up these bigger conversations.

I also see time as a strong thread in your work, both in terms of concept and literal duration.

More recently, my works have become ephemeral. I don’t really care if some of the things that I create will survive over the years. I’m more focused on the process and being with the people right here right now. I guess a good example could be the Grieving Garden, which is a garden with plants that symbolically refer to death, but also to rebirth, grieving, and many elements that could relate to death, like memory. I’ve planted a few of these grieving gardens since, and they were all made in public spaces, so everyone who feels like visiting can spend some time there. So, they exist, but for a limited period of time because eventually, the plants begin to die. Firstly, because some of them are very seasonal plants, and they live only for one season. Sometimes the weather conditions are also quite hard, and some plants might need more water, or more wet surface, or ground, while others don’t.

It’s also very intuitive. I wasn’t thinking about it in a way that part of the installation is that it has to die. It just happened when I did it the first time and then I thought that maybe there’s some sort of beauty in that as well, that it’s something temporary. If people who I planted the garden with want to continue to take care of it, then it’s great, but if not, I’m okay with that. The garden is also a reflection of life because something dies and then something is reborn out of it, like this circle of life.

Grieving Garden, 2021, view from the MeetFactory studio, photo by Richard Hodonicky.

There’s a constant connection to nature in your work. It seems like something that’s also used a lot to talk about life or time spans as well.

I spent my childhood outside because I was raised in a small village, so I was always deeply connected to nature. It was just part of my everyday life, like running around the hills, being in the forest, or swimming in the river. But then I moved to the city, and I forgot about it. When my brother died and I was experiencing that kind of grief for the first time, I felt that I really needed some grounding. I needed some connection with the planet, and I needed to know that I was here for a reason and like this soil was happy to have me here. I found this in nature; it was like an explosion. It was soothing, but then also gave me a lot of energy to go through these very difficult times. I’m grateful for this and that it stayed with me.

I’m also thinking about going back to my roots, where I came from, and why I love it so much. I just started to use that kind of relationship that I have with nature in my artworks and that just became a starting point for considering many important issues for me. I’m interested in my relationship with nature, but also the relationship of nature, humans, and non-human actors that do not project anthropocentric perception. Is it even possible to do or get closer to that state? I think a lot about how we can use some wisdom from nature and apply it to our everyday life.

You can find more of Jagoda Dobecka’s work on her website and Instagram.

Part Two: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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