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Hear on Treaty 7: The Politics of Sound

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

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

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

The Galt Museum & Archives

By Migueltzinta Solís

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sprüth Magers, London

February 3 – 25 March, 2023

By Crystal Li

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zanele Muholi: The Celebration of Black LGBTQIA+ Identity

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

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

By Irene Bernardi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zanele Muholi. *Aftermath* 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do We Discard? Specimen by Susan Low-Beer

September 10, 2022 – January 21, 2023

RiverBrink Art Museum

By Lera Kotsyuba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know about hidden things by Juliane Foronda

“…between two beings across great distance.”

January 7 — February 19, 2022

Trinity Square Video

By Katie Lawson

Those who are a part of artistic communities and actively participate in the work of the artist, curator, or critic, know very well that the presentation of one’s work is merely the tip of the iceberg when below the surface of the water is a matrix of relationships that inform the ‘final’ product.

I know about hidden things is a collaborative project initiated by writer and curator Letticia Cosbert Miller which foregrounds Filipina-Canadian artist Juliane Foronda’s ongoing research concerning feminist hospitality, radical care, and traditions of gathering. The exhibition took place at Trinity Square Video in Toronto from January 7—February 19, 2022, yet lives on through its accompanying publication, an art object in and of itself. Foronda and Cosbert Miller invited Danica Evering, Camille Georgeson-Usher, Karina Griffith, and Ronald Rose-Antoinette to become entangled in the process of the exhibition’s making, meeting regularly in the development of the work. Each collaborator would produce contemporaneously a text to accompany the work, not as didactic works of criticism but as a manifestation of a network of relationships based on symbiosis. The artworks in the exhibition consider the role of physical, emotional, and ephemeral support structures, the concealed labour of care and hospitality in spaces and so-called inanimate objects. The texts that make up the printed edition become a support structure for the visitor, a generous gesture that welcomes the reader into a collective dialogue.

*I know about hidden things,* publication materials. Photo by Katie Lawson.

This approach to publication embodies feminist practices of lateral citation: to cite one’s peers, friends, cohort, and colleagues rather than citing upwards, towards a hierarchy of ‘legitimized’ scholarship, making visible the de-centered labour within artistic communities that so often goes unrecognized in the ‘final’ presentation of exhibitions or artworks. The printed edition that accompanied the show compels me to think about publication as a form of democratic dissemination, which opens this network of relationships to those who in turn hold and care for and think alongside an artist, curator, or critic. The texts are packaged in a sculptural bundle, with each writer’s contribution taking a distinct design, material quality, and typographic form. What holds this bundle together is a thoughtfully folded shell, which has the primary descriptive exhibition text and checklist on it in an embossed pink that I found myself running my hands over as I walked around the gallery with it in my hands. Foronda’s work becomes the literal and figurative container or carrier bag for the contributions held within.

I was struck by a phrase in Ronald Rose-Antoinette’s contribution that points towards an atmosphere diffused through a workshop held by Foronda, “the function of which is to betray the totality power wants us to recite.” Power might be understood as predicated on notions of totality and singular authorship, ways of working that are rejected even within the context of what is ostensibly a solo exhibition for the artist, sharing that space with those deeply engaged in the process of its very making. Rose-Antoinette’s ‘Support the Notes’ is a series of poetic fragments that dance across double-sided peach paper, with a deep yet vibrant blue serif text. It feels atmospheric and ethereal, with a level of subtlety embodied in two of Foronda’s works that, in particular, speak softly: magic hour and valuable and flawed. magic hour consists of two barely-there projections of past light rainbows, aimed at the infrastructural supports of the TSV space, reminiscent of the reflections of light that might dance across a room with the shifting sun. valuable and flawed uses small quantities of wood, paper, stone, and tape which take the form of makeshift wedges in the minor space between the floor and the base of the eastern wall. These two works draw the eye around the architecture of Trinity Square Video, with its tactile delights and quirks as a post-industrial space with historic resonances. How is the space of the gallery its own structure of support?

Juliane Foronda. *magic hour*, 2021. video projector installation, images of past light rainbows
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

One can feel held by a space or a place, after all, as Camille Georgeson-Usher reminds us in ‘On being elsewhere – these archives of guilt.’ Perhaps the most narrative in form of the text contributions, she describes the embodied experience of returning home, to Galiano Island, and how that immersion allows her to feel deeply across time, deep time, feeling the remnants of care from ancestors in the trees, the water, and air. Across this long, narrow yellow paper, which folds down into a square, Georgeson-Usher wonders how to contend with feelings of guilt, getting lost, and displacement. Questions of reciprocity arise in reading this work alongside Foronda’s exhibition. If a place, a space, or a so-called inanimate object can provide and impart care, who cares for them in return?

The spoon is an object that Foronda returns to in her practice and finds its way into the exhibition through unit of measure, a series of plaster casts from the concave bowl of spoons. More specifically, spoons that were used during a residency at MeetFactory in Prague in Fall 2021. Their smooth, ambiguous forms rest on a low lying plinth painted the same soothing peach tone as the feature wall of the gallery. The spoon in its shape and function is not so different from using one’s own hands in sharing and consuming a meal, a practice that is common outside of Western dining traditions. Beneath the surface of this work, I am reminded of how place settings can carry colonial coding and inscriptions of race and class. Karina Griffith’s Did you lay the table? Yes, I set the table consists of a pale manila, single-sided half sheet of paper with deep purple sans serif text, a series or list of eighteen ‘rules embedded into traditions of drinking, dining, and hosting.

Juliane Foronda. *unit of measure*, 2021. plaster casts of the concave of spoons.
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

Danica Evering offers a series of text fragments, which literally unfold across the many-paneled, accordion-creased paper, which when collapsed fits in the palm of the hand, much like Foronda’s spoon casts. In one panel, Evering wonders how the ephemeral becomes solid, how “plaster makes this archive tender.” The vibrant green text on soft grey paper draws in quotes from Eugenie Waters, Mark Clintberg, Jennifer Doyle, and Tegan Jones, serving as a further expansion of the matrix of relationships held within this project. This contribution takes up aspects of Foronda’s work most literally or explicitly, as aspects of the exhibition come in and out of focus—the false sense of security given by the examination table paper, a direct response to the work coping mechanisms, and questions of harm and harm reduction. There is only one panel that has the text rotated 90 degrees to the left which strikes me as an outlier, and it reads: “between two beings across great distance.”

I have to remind myself that I know about hidden things went from concept to realization during a time of pandemic and isolation, with Foronda, Cosbert-Miller, Rose-Antoinette, Griffith, Georgeson-Usher, and Evering working virtually across great distances. It is no small feat that their collaboration feels so intimate and deeply connected. There is a warmth and tactility to both the exhibition and the publication that draw the visitor in, much like a good host. Is feminist hospitality an attempt to close or narrow that distance between us?

I feel compelled to mention my own personal connection with Foronda, who I feel very grateful to have had in my life as a friend and peer over the last six years. We met just before she moved to Iceland for her MFA, and what would follow was a period of writing one another lengthy emails and letters that moved between the personal and professional. We would send what others might deem the ‘scraps’ of our day-to-day life across oceans as a part of our growing ongoing long-distance kinship—rocks, dried flowers, transit stubs, and exhibitions pamphlets scrawled with notes, home-mixed spice blends, confetti, stickers, pins, postcards, a carefully selected stamp, a packet of dehydrated sourdough starter. We are both collectors, or hoarders, of curious objects and thoughts. I have been grateful to move between guest and host in this enduring exchange, and I can’t help but imagine the many copies of the I know about hidden things publication existing out in the world, a gift and care package from Foronda. In a part of a recent interview in Contemporary Art Stavanger, a quote from Foronda has stayed with me, that captures the ethos behind her practice, this project, and an unending process of being in relation has stayed with me: “The research alone will only go so far if it’s not shared.”^[1]

^[1]Foronda, Juliane. “Interview: Juliane Foronda” Contemporary Art Stavanger, November 23, 2021. https://www.contemporaryartstavanger.no/interview-juliane-foronda/

You can also find this review in the second print issue of Femme Art Review on Queer and Feminist Collaboration.

Bridge Obscura, a Portal to Iranian Community

*Bridge Obscura* by Shahrzad Amin. Installation photo. Photo by Shahrzad Amin, courtesy of the artist.

To You, From Me, For Us

May 30th – August 15th, 2022

Ignite Gallery

By Ignazio Colt Nicastro

My steps into Ignite Gallery were met with soothing sounds of retreating waves, a euphony of avian calls, and a rich Iranian voice as it sang throughout the gallery. These varying sounds drew me in deeper through this group exhibition To You, From Me, For Us, by multidisciplinary artists: Elyse Longair, Mohammed Tabesh, Atanas Bozdarov, Cailin Doherty, Ante Kurilic, and Shahrzad Amin. Collectively, this exhibition spoke to each artists’ lived diasporic experiences, forming a cultural exchange of war, disability, immigration, and environmental degradation. For Shahrzad Amin, this became an opportunity to connect herself, and others, to the people of Isfahan, Iran via her installation, Bridge Obscura. This multi-sensory homage houses historical references and iconography from Iran while showcasing contemporary examples of what it means to live within the community of this Iranian city.

*To You, From Me, For Us* Installation photo. Photo by Shahrzad Amin, courtesy of the artist.

After following the rhythmic hymns inspired by the Persian poet, Hafez, viewers meet with the physicality of this audio, visual, and tangible installation. Atop a thick black plank, three rows of carved plywood stand firmly ahead of a video projection. Each archway comprised the underside foundation of this bridge that Amin created to extend our Toronto plane into a nostalgic, exploratory, and sensory ethnographic representation of Iran.

Amin invites viewers to step inside the bridge where they first pass under fine engravings along the archway. Upon closer inspection, one will note the tessellation of geometric symbols that are inspired by the star-and-cross design, an emblem that pre-dates the advent of Islam. The intricate engraving is also fused with floral and arabesque patterns and overall is a symbolic representation of the past and present. In some ways, as viewers pass under these engravings they activate the potential of this bridge, this portal, that allows them to transcend time and space. Viewers’ eyes are drawn through the archways that echo through the veil that is Amin’s film, which consists of video and sound compilations taken in Isfahan.

Throughout this 11-minute film, viewers start at the Khaju Bridge before entering the Boostan Ayineh Khaneh Park. The camera guides viewers through the crowds of Isfahan until they arrive at the Allah-Verdi Khan Bridge. It’s quickly recognized that in every moment of this film, the essence of community is not monolithic and is widespread among the city’s people. Amin presented these various acts of community through the shared acoustic ecology of joyous singers under bridges, free-spirited dancing in the streets, and the act of sharing meals with friends, family, and strangers. This synthesis of personal, cultural, and affective levels of care shown in her community allowed Amin to further develop a bond with her audience.

As an immigrant from Isfahan, Amin tapped into her childhood memories to create this visual experience. The blurred motions of passersby mimic popular media cues that suggest slowed time and flashbacks. By utilizing her auditory and ocular memories, Amin has inserted a sense of nostalgia in this film that resonates with Iranian viewers. Though Bridge Obscura is meant to connect the people of Canada to those in Iran, it is largely a homage to Amin’s first home.

Bridge Obscura is a portal that ties viewers to Iran physically, metaphorically, and emotionally, as Iranian geography, history, and culture act as the foundation of the piece. Bridges play a critical role in the history of Iran as they were connectors between civilizations along trade routes. The engravings in Bridge Obscura specifically speak to a deeper history in Iran. With inspiration from the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, Amin has extended the Perso-Islamic architecture designs into her work. Designs such as these were common in Iran’s block printing, which has been used for centuries on fabric and cloth for Qalamkar.

Many guests who are not Iranian may not pick up on these historic and cultural traces, but withstanding, Amin has cultivated this thread of humanity that all viewers can resonate with. The exhibition title itself, To You, From Me, For Us, suggests that the artists are bringing forward their lived experiences for viewers to learn from, but ultimately this act is for their communities. The Iranian diaspora who view Amin’s work will now resurrect and access their memories of home while reflecting on their stories beneath the bridges amongst the isolationism in Iran.

At its core, Bridge Obscura counters the isolationism which has been imposed upon Iran’s everyday citizens via internal and external political factors. Though Amin’s practice has overtly worked against being guided by political discourse, these discussions around everyday life in Isfahan urge us to remain vigilant to the current crisis Iranian women and people are facing in response to the tragic killing of Mahsa Amini. Internally, political bodies segregated Iranian’s from the rest of the world through the prohibition of internet access and the jailing of educators, journalists, and protestors. Externally, media outlets ignored the demands for help until our voices were too loud for them to dismiss. This concept of isolationism is now being challenged as people across the globe rally together to chant ‘Woman, Life, Freedom,’ a courageous act of community that stemmed from the women and people of Iranian diaspora. Bridge Obscura not only connects people to Iranians but also displays how sentiments of community can be shown through more than love and kindness, but also anger and fear. As a child, Amin witnessed community through the street life of Isfahan. As an adult, she witnesses it as the unification of people inside and outside of Isfahan standing together for justice.

There is irony in Amin’s choice of using a bridge to portray this message, as bridges have a specific use of connecting people and things that have been separated. This installation acknowledges Amin’s distance from home while simultaneously connecting her, and others, to it. It reminds her that even amidst the isolationism back home, moments of tenderness, care, and love can be found. Bridge Obscura does not exclusively exist for Amin to hold on to this reminder, it is also for the citizens of Iran and everyone around the world.

The Potentiality of the Returned Gaze

proximity, pleasure, plasticity: looking at performance at Dazibao

© Installation view of the exhibition *proximity · pleasure · plasticity. looking at performance*, Dazibao, 2022. Photo: Marilou Crispin.

By Maria Isabel Martinez

April 21 – June 23, 2022

Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject,
demi-mesure (Clara Cousineau + Marion Paquette), Every Ocean Hughes, Francisco González-Rosas, Freya Björg Olafson, Hannah Wilke, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Lisa Smolkin, Manoushka Larouche, NIC Kay, and Wan Yi Leung

The three keywords framing the exhibition, proximity, pleasure, plasticity: looking at performance cause me to search for the words in the works rather than allowing the works to speak amongst themselves. It’s as if by this move to name, we are being instructed on how to look—perhaps this is a problem with titles more generally. proximity, pleasure, plasticity is a group show featuring twelve artists at Dazibao, an art center in Montréal, developed by Emma-Kate Guimond, the Exhibition and Special Projects Coordinator, under the direction of France Choinière. As I move across the dimly lit space, one work offers a glimpse of a titular word only to have it dropped as I continue to another piece. The “looking at performance” part of the title can signal a few things: how someone appears; the act of viewing that an audience member participates in; the position of a camera towards artists and performers, a technology that captures a momentary happening within a permanent loop. But if, as written in Dazibao’s exhibition poster, we’re meant to consider the relationship between viewer and viewed, then the three P’s of the title disturb such a simple directive. Instead, we’re thrust into an exhibition of pluralisms that tries to fit within its titular constraints while begging to step outside them. The wordplay here is its own performance.

A gaze mediated through a lens can be oppressive or liberatory depending on who holds it and what sort of image is produced. proximity, pleasure, plasticity’s plurality gives space (literally and figuratively) to a diversity of experiences. Erected in the middle of the large room is a single wall; one side features Francisco González-Rosas’s Identity templates for a disordered body (2022) and Wan Yi Leung’s Alone with the cat in the room (2018) plays on the opposite side. As the title suggests, González-Rosas’s work addresses identity and the virtual self through a drag persona, while Leung’s work touches on the power dynamics of desire and a sexual economy. Curatorial decisions like these suggest that queer and feminist understandings of the three titular P’s are suffused throughout the space and the pieces form a type of coalition toward challenging an obtuse spectator. As many of the artists put their bodies on display, the boundary between subject and object collapses. As the artist addresses their audience, we become implicated in their projects and begin to feel like the artist is the one doing the looking after all.

In Ivetta Sunyoung Kang’s Proposition 1: Hands (2020), the viewer becomes a participant. A video plays directly across from the entrance, and below the projected image, a mat has been set up for gallery goers to sit and enact the gestures Kang performs on screen. The movements are based on a South Korean children’s game (“Make Electricity on Hands”) which Kang has transformed into a massage therapy. The project encourages the viewer to take a partner’s hand in theirs, sense its properties, and with friction and other movements, enhance its warmth and sensations. The video opens by declaring: “This video is a proposition on tolerance of the uncertainty ahead of your future” and it suggests that our anxieties could be endured through contact with the other. Kang offers proximity, pleasure, and yes, plasticity through this exercise, but it requires that the viewer accept their desire for these conditions. We must see ourselves the way Kang sees us.

The role of the viewer as the subject in Chukwudubem Ukaigwe’s The Shivering (2020) collapses once more as the Black male participants in the video gaze back. The camera shivers and the participants appear blurred. The description of this work states that the blurred image “mirrors the fragility of their experience” and the camera’s shaking is indicative of the instability of viewing itself. Can we trust a camera as a technology of documentation? The piece prompts me to consider whether one could ever be an accurate observer. Moving image culture often portrays narrow depictions of Black masculinity as either violent and threatening or as targets of brutality. However, Ukaigwe puts this binary into disarray, as the subjects are still and the camera pans over them with a slight tremble. I find myself straining my eyes to get a more accurate look at the people on screen. The individuals looked into the camera, at times face-on and other times with their backs to the lens. It’s this mutual gazing that disrupts the neat binary between the viewer and the viewed: the participants appear to be as equally aware of us as we are of them.

The exhibition raises questions about how the presence of the lens alters our proximity to each other and the reverberations that surface from that emergent closeness. At times, the works seem to be reaching in different directions—Wan Yi Leung’s Alone with the cat in the room and Demi-mesure’s (Clara Cousineau and Marion Paquette) aestheticized and choreographed video performance de nature intérieure for example. But this plurality serves as a gathering of different “pleasures,” splitting conventional definitions of the titular words into fractals. Proximity occurs explicitly in works such as Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject’s Something between my face and your face is always interesting (2021), a livestream examining virtual distance.

Plasticity might be the hardest “P” to track across the exhibit, though the works serve as apt examples of engagements with the mutable quality of relations between the self/selves, technologies, and each other. The viewer/viewed dynamic takes on its own process of plasticity, through moments of closeness and delight at engaging with aesthetic experimentations. Ultimately, it is the camera and performativity that unite the pieces: how the artists exert themselves through the image, and raise questions, or taunt, the viewer about the fluid and sometimes disconcerting nature of spectatorship.

This review is featured in the second print issue of Femme Art Review on Queer and Feminist Collaboration.

Velvet Terrorism: A Story by Pussy Riot’s Russia

*Punk Prayer,* Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, 2012, courtesy of the artists.

November 24th to January 29th, 2023

Kling&Bang

By Irene Bernardi

Velvet Terrorism is the first exhibition by the Russian feminist performance art group Pussy Riot. The exhibition at Kling&Bang in Reykjavik, Iceland is curated by Dorothee Kirch, Ragnars Kjartanssonar, and Ingibjargar Sigurjónsdóttur. Velvet Terrorism narrates the history of Russian totalitarianism through the memories of Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, a founding member of the group since its first performance back in 2011. With their mix of music, art, and rebellion, Pussy Riot became an icon of the opposition against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oppressive policies from his second election in 2012 to the Ukraine War in 2022.

The exhibition displays itself as a massive punk-rock journal, full of pictures, writings, colorful duct tape, and video installations. In a sparkling font, the exhibit’s title opens the door to the first video, an original work by Icelandic artist and curator Ragnars Kjartanssonar. The artist films a group member while she urinates over a blowup of Putin. Her face is hidden under the iconic ski mask, the eyes are focused on the camera with an unmoved and resolute look. This act of defiance ends with the performer kicking Putin’s picture, which falls on the ground surrounded by splashes of urine.

Kjartanssonar’s work welcomes the audience, who gets thrown into a creative chaos of pictures and screens that saturates the room up to the ceiling. The art pieces chronologically tell the story of Pussy Riot. Not only does it show their actions and performances, but it reports the media’s lies about the arrest of Masha and Lucy Shtein – an activist and Masha’s partner – following the 2012 performance of the song Punk Prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Masha paid for this performance with a two-year sentence in a penal colony in the Ural Mountains, more than 1000 km away from Moscow. The performance also gives the exhibition its title, since “Velvet Terrorism” is the moniker that Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, considered to be Vladimir Putin’s spiritual confidant, used to address it.

*Policeman enters the Game*, Moscow’s Final World Cup, 2018, courtesy of the artists.

Once Alyokhina and Shtein were released, protests and performances didn’t stop—on display the visitors can see the most iconic performances like Policemen Enters the Game, when activists demanded the stop of police abuses and the release of every political prisoner by invading the playing field during the World Cup final in 2018. Another one is the “homage” paid to President Putin for his sixty-eighth birthday when Pussy Riot placed rainbow flags over five government buildings in Moscow. Many other actions and demonstrations led Alyokhina to serve house arrest until April 2022. In protest of the declaration of war against Ukraine, Masha cut off her electronic wristband. This demonstration cost her a new sentence for having broken the terms of probation which started in to which she was obliged September 2021.

*Rainbow flags,* Moscow’s Culture Ministry building, 2020, courtesy of the artists.

In the last room of the exhibition, two videos ironically show the ankle guards as if they were in the window of a jewelry store. The exhibition seems to end there, until a security guard tells the visitors they need to leave their belongings and proceed through a cramped little room where the Russian national anthem is played at full volume.

Once the visitor leaves this temporary prison, they return to the exhibition’s entrance by going through a tunnel where pictures and videos of the latest Pussy Riot performances are shown all over the walls. At the entrance, the visitor learns about the presence of many surveillance cameras all over the exhibition, a clear allusion to the oppressive media encirclement in Putin’s regime.

The exhibition, which launched on November 24th and will last until January 29th, 2023, originated from the collaboration between Ragnars Kjartanssonar and Maria Alyokhina. The artist helped the activist leave Russia after her latest sentence and Alyokhina started a European tour with the Pussy Riot members to promote her book Riot Days, published in 2017.

Velvet Terrorism is undoubtedly a complex retrospective. It aims to show the group’s strength and its desire to emerge and state the truth. The exhibition uses an irreverent punk attitude by turning the objects that characterize a violent dictatorship into artistic subjects. Whether it is a prison, a whip, a surveillance camera, or a Putin image, Pussy Riot can use it to mock the regime and regain power and freedom in their hands.

Check out Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia at Kling&Bang in Reykjavík, now extended until January 29th, 2023.

Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?

Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser, *Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?*, virtual reality still, 16mins, 2021. Courtesy of the artists.

Gallery TPW

September 9 to November 5, 2022

By Mitsuko Noguchi

When I first walked through the exhibition doors into Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?, Gallery TPW’s front desk attendant followed me in, carrying a bulky headset. They directed me: “Sit anywhere you’d like.” Embroidered bean bags slumped on the floor and two uniform benches faced a wall-sized screen. The attendant handed me the headset, and when I successfully goggled up, a humanoid appeared stark in the center of my view–startlingly close and startlingly real. The humanoid gently swayed in turquoise pool water. They wouldn’t stop staring at me. This, I thought, must be Piña.

From September 9th to November 5th, Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser presented their popular immersive installation in Toronto. On the exhibition walls, black and white geometric fabric prints hung in irregularly shaped frames, reminding me of tribal art but made by an obviously non-human hand. I later learned that the delicate white fabric was made of pineapple, and the black plastic embroidery by a 3D printer. Shackled to a foreign virtual reality, the gallery walls and their abstract frames disappeared.

Throughout the 16-minute VR experience, Piña showed me life as an AI shaman in a futuristic world. Piña often dwelled in water, where they draped wet cloth on rock–informing me that these fabric slips are encoded with data and sent by “messengers.” Sometimes, the shaman stepped into a more familiar world, and I felt as if I were watching another teen beauty-vlogger as they promoted their favourite concealer. Piña also repeatedly held up their iPhone to show me videos of others speaking. The speakers were always muted; Piña and I would share silence.

Behind the VR video, a half-hour documentary-style film played on repeat, waiting to be experienced separate from the VR story. The film followed three Amazonian “messengers” living in our near future, each of whom communicated through a radio broadcast. Real footage from the Philippines and Ecuador backdropped the fictional stories of women-led knowledge transmitters and community builders. The messengers spoke about their connection to the land, and Piña drifted in and out through voiceover, like a cloud.

“Piña” translates to “pineapple” from Spanish. In an interview, the artists explain the colonial commodification of pineapples, tracking from Ecuadorian land, into Filipino plantations, and finally to bourgeois European dining rooms[1]. In Piña, the recurring symbol of the pineapple epitomizes the grounding of culture onto physical earth and what it means for colonization to uproot this connection.

Comilang and Speiser’s distinct cultural backgrounds are the cornerstones of the installation, and their styles merge with a bold elegance. Stephanie Comilang is a Filipina-Canadian artist who uses the lens of film to explore cultural heritage and futures. Co-creator Simon Speiser is an Ecuadorian artist based in Berlin, who works in a diverse range of media–from sculpture to writing to video. Together, these artists explore the enduring survival of Filipino and Ecuadorian ancestral knowledge and matriarchal lineages. For the project, Comilang and Speiser interviewed shamans about how they have held onto their ways of life amidst colonial violence[2]. The artists re-imagined these documented stories through sci-fi narrative, exploring the trajectory of tradition into our rapidly evolving, techno-laced future.

Piña traverses both the interconnected human experience and the deeply personal. Observing Piña’s solitary existence in the VR, I felt alone, too: the enclosed headset felt like a lonely, mysterious passageway. At the end of the passage, Piña both confronted me and comforted me at an eerily spiritual level. When I emerged from the VR, a single stranger and I watched the film together. Here, the air felt a little lighter, and the film’s knowledge flowed freely into this communal space.

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? tells stories of how nature, technology, and humanity merge. Comilang and Speiser transform reality through layering past, present, and future into a multi-dimensional sphere. When I exited TPW and walked home, Piña faded in my memory the way a dream might, with the feeling that I was walking away from magic. I grasped a memory of Piña’s voice: “Now you’ve found me.” I wondered if I had, and if I might find little slips of Piña’s world again in my own.

—————

[1] Lillian O’Brien Davis, “PIÑA, WHY IS THE SKY BLUE? Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser,” MacKenzie Art Gallery, 2022, https://mackenzie.art/site-content/uploads/2022/03/PinaWhyIsTheSkyBlue_Essay_WebVersion.pdf.

[2] Lisa Long, “The Materiality of The Future Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser in Conversation with Lisa Long,” JSC Berlin, 2022, https://www.jsc.art/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/JSC_PINA_CATALOGUE_LOW_RES6313811.pdf.

kind renderings: Rendezvous With Madness Festival

October 27 – November 6, 2022

Workman Arts Offsite Gallery, Rendezvous With Madness Festival

*kind renderings* Exhibition Installation shot.2022. Photo by Henry Chan, courtesy of Workman Arts.

By Aysia Tse

kind renderings is the group exhibition for Workman Arts’ 2022 Rendezvous With Madness Festival with the theme being “More Than Rebellion.” Working towards generational change, better informed public discourse, and supporting representation surrounding mental health and addiction, Rendezvous With Madness Festival organizes screenings, exhibitions, workshops, panel talks, performances, and more.

kind renderings, located at the Workman Arts Offsite Gallery in Artscape Youngplace, considers kindness as an act of choice. Six artists share the space, creating work stemming from their own lived experiences with mental health and well-being. Processes of self-reflection, vulnerability, struggle, and healing are all present throughout each work in the exhibition. Together, they form a collection of work that addresses challenging experiences through diverse approaches and explore a range of emotional tones.

*kind renderings*. Twinkle Banerjee, *The things we carry with us* (2011). Photo by Henry Chan, courtesy of Workman Arts.

First entering the gallery space, Twinkle Banerjee’s installation The things we carry with us (2011) covers the wall with newsprints from floor to ceiling. Crumpled, burnt articles are scattered over blue patterned fabric, and two images are mounted on the wall; a photogram of hair mixed of the artist’s and her mother’s, and a collage made with cyanotype from a film negative of her grandmother. In an essay about the work, Banerjee speaks about the pain that comes from generational trauma and reflects on her interpersonal relationship with her grandmother. She opens up about the resentment that comes with family dysfunction and inherited trauma rooted in displacement arising from political policy. The partition of India caused her grandmother to be one of the millions who were displaced as children. Collaging multiple copies of the newsprints with alarming headlines that include reports of murder and arson, injuries and killing, and other acts of violence give more context to her grandmother’s lived experience and familial history.

kind renderings. Stéphane Alexis with his installation, *Chains & Crowns* (2022). Photo by Henry Chan.

Across from Banerjee’s installation is Chains & Crowns (2022) by Stéphane Alexis. A large black, white, and purple photo banner with 16 hairstyles arranged in a grid covers the opposing wall. In the accompanying statement, each hairstyle is numbered 1-16 with a description of the hairstyle, including the common name, historical background, social, and cultural significance. The Hi-Top, Senegalese Twist, Cornrows, Bantu Knots, Ghana Braids are some of the hairstyles featured. For Alexis, this socio-political project reflects on his interpersonal relationship with hair and self, speaking about familial influences and the community and family histories that grounds his work. In his artist talk, Alexis spoke about how history grounds us in who we are and contributes to a communal sense of understanding. In this photography project, he wanted to reflect on the hardships of Black history but also highlight a sense of resilience and boldness.

*kind renderings.* Jenny Chen with her animation, *Multitude of Fish – Ascension Tales*. 2022. Photo by Henry Chan.

Moving further into the space, an animation project by Jenny Chen titled Multitude of Fish – Ascension Tales (2022) is projected on a wall behind the gallery desk. Reflecting on energetic bodies and exploring spirituality, Chen uses fish as symbols and their journey to the heavens as a reflection of their own wellness journey and process of healing. In the adjacent room, artist Boozie’s work brings more personality to the space with Losing It, a series of framed digital illustrations. Portraits inspired by a continuing time in her life of confronting and documenting her inner self-talk, Boozie uses images of hamster wheels to illustrate the feeling of never-ending cyclical thoughts. In this series created as an outlet or coping strategy, she personifies these demons and draws them wearing white underwear – an image that she hopes brings some humour and silliness to disarm their constant presence.

*kind renderings.* Boozie pictured with her illustration series, *Losing It*. Photo by Henry Chan.

*kind renderings.* Paintings from Wen Tong’s series *Cinnamon*. 2022. Photo by Henry Chan.

Wen Tong’s painting series Cinnamon (2022) shows a shift in her perspective during the COVID-19 lockdown. Painted in a magical realist style, Tong depicts everyday imagery and speaks about finding magical moments in the mundane through painting a “poetic truth.” Opposite these bright, colourful, and painterly pieces, Jessica Field’s work My left-hand is talking and my right-had is nurturing at first glance, looks like charcoal drawings with handwritten text. As a new media artist, Field’s practice involves physical computing, coding, and fabricating “artificial agents.” The drawings on display are produced by an artificial intelligence computer she has worked on for over 10 years. As she feeds her art into the AI, it produces more work that is reflective of her drawings, writing, and experiences with her process of healing. Field’s work considers the reclamation of medical terms and the “treatment of injuries that feel unreconcilable.” Accompanying the drawings is a video of Field reading her poems in a walk-through of her book that documents a collection of drawings and poems. A print copy of the book is also on display for visitors to explore on their own. Looking forward, Field wonders if over time, as she heals, the AI drawings will slowly reflect her recovery and evolve with her.

*kind renderings.* Jessica Field with her work, *My left-hand is talking and my right-had is nurturing*.2022. Photo by Henry Chan.

The artists and their work consider the complexity of the human condition that involves trauma, healing, familial, political, and historical factors. They also explore intra and interpersonal relationships that affect our health and well-being in positive and negative ways. The title kind renderings support the space as a tender one – one where artists can make work about challenging topics, share them in a safe space, and approach these conversations together with the care and kindness they deserve.