Who Taught You to Love? In Discussion with Pamila Matharu

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

Interview by Paniz Vedavarz and Adi Berardini

Pamila Matharu is a multidisciplinary artist of Panjabi descent (maternal roots from pre-partition Lahore of former British India (now Pakistan), then Jalandhar (Panjab, India), and paternal roots from Bhano Langha, a village of Kapurthala district, Panjab, India, born in Birmingham, England, and arrived in Canada in 1976. They are based in Tkarónto/Toronto – Treaty 13 territory. Approaching contemporary art from the position of critical pedagogy and using an intersectional feminist lens through counter-archiving, their work culminates in a broad range of forms, including installation art, collage, social practice, and experimental media art.

Matharu speaks more about their art practice and their exhibition, Where Were You in ’92? at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, curated by Emelie Chhangur, Nasrin Himada, and Charlotte Gagnier, and their multi-media installation as part of the 2024 Toronto Biennial, tere naal _ with you, that pays tribute to the enduring influence of the artist Winsom Winsom. Pamila was introduced to Winsom through the Fresh Arts program, a Black artist-led initiative that opened doors for numerous artists. The installation was deliberately designed as a space for rest as defiance, nurturing, and replenishment. Reflecting on standing up against current and past injustices, Matharu uses the space to instill a sense of hope, asking participants to reflect on the question, “Who taught you to love?”

Paniz Vedavarz: Your zines and installations interweave your personal experiences with wider community stories. How do you navigate blending your own voice with the voices of others, particularly when dealing with sensitive or painful histories?

I’m coming at it from lived experience. My storytelling is being accessed through my own lived experience, my memories, visceral memories. What I’m trying to do is use history as a medium, and I started to realize that history wasn’t changing much around looking at police brutality on Black and Brown lives. What does it mean to witness it at 19 or 20 years old? What does it mean to witness it in my 40s and my 50s now?  In some ways, I’m using the circle as a framework, but has the needle really stretched that far? In some cases, yes, I would say. But still, there’s a way to go.

Adi Berardini: For sure. Especially seeing everything right now in the news and politics, it feels like we’re going so backward.

Pamila Matharu: This is what I mean.  It’s when people ask, “Why are you delving into the past?” Well, you can’t figure out the future without looking at the past.

AB: You address mentorship through your practice, such as your exhibition ‘Where Were You in ’92?’ at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, which looked at the Fresh Arts multi-disciplinary arts program in the 90s that created space for Black and Indigenous youth, and later racialized youth. You particularly reference your relationship with artist Winsom Winsom. Can you explain more about this pivotal mentorship and how you’ve used it as inspiration in your practice and as a mode to research and display the under-recorded impact of the program that impacted generation(s) of artists?

PM: Fresh Arts is a period that comes up in the Black Arts Movement. And when we talk about movement, when it comes to art history, it’s always Western methodologies and Western art history, yet the Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists are nowhere to be found. And we are always the sidebar or the thin chapter at the end, or perhaps the last couple of lectures in a Western art history survey course.

The project I was invited to at Agnes Etherington Art Centre was to “roll out the red carpet,” or metaphorically, finally give my flowers to Winsom. What I mean by that is to explain my relationship to her, and how I have spoken of Winsom informally in spaces and with curators and with artists, with institutional folks for the last 25 years; my relationship passed 30 years in 2024, when I met her in the summer of 1994.

In 2022, the project at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Where Were You in ’92?, was mostly research-based. I often use my platforms strategically to invite other underrepresented artists who I reckon could use exposure from the platform I’m initially asked to take up space on. In this case, I was asked by Emelie Chhangur, the [former] Executive Director & Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, to examine Winsom’s relationship to the city of Kingston, Ontario.  At the time, before or while the request was happening, Winsom’s actual archive was being shipped from Belize to the AGO Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives.  I had to access her archives at the AGO Library and Archives, which I had previously had a relationship with through an earlier project I did in 2019 at A Space Gallery, where I found some discarded material from their library and archives. I built an entire exhibition, and that’s where this moniker of counter-archiving came from, because I did not undertake an information sciences degree or anything of the like.

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

I’ve always had a strong interest in research from primary sources like books and literature. I’m not a practicing writer— I write for pleasure and my own studio practice, well, grant applications really! I definitely dabble in creative writing, but I don’t make it one of the things I share openly too much, and Emelie was aware of that. In terms of my lived experience and narrating this story and legacy, in a former project we did earlier than that, back in 2012 at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, in an intersectional feminist exhibit curated by Pamela Edmonds and Carla Garnet. Emelie had already, in some ways, planted the seeds of inviting me into Agnes and to do this project. Chhangur really is the constant gardener!

But in some ways, I was circumventing and ‘migrating the margin’, which was also a show that we did at the Art Gallery of York University [Now The Goldfarb Gallery of York University]. But I’m using the terminology of migrating the margins, where I was looking at Winsom’s archive at the AGO Library and Archives, which houses six boxes of fonds.[1] I think it might be growing for Winsom’s practice, in terms of her materiality, her research material that she’s archived. And I was asked to focus solely on Kingston, Ontario.

Winsom spent close to 30 years in Kingston, Ontario, and I believe that she helped establish Black Kingston, and what I mean by that is community-engaged, artistic programming, as well as organizational activities. Kingston has five jails, and there are a number of hospitals. It’s also formerly Upper Canada, and that was the “center” prior to Ottawa becoming our federal capital. In terms of the nation-state history, there are a lot of layers, and I was challenged to think through and grow a methodology from the archives and unofficial records.

I say it’s a methodology because my methodology is collage. I use it in the most abstract sense as well as the most very minute kind of paper collage: paper and cut and paste. But then I also collage in space, through sound, video. I created a handmade collage mural on the walls of Agnes, where I surveyed Winsom’s 30 years and all the material that was within that roughly 30-year span in Kingston.  I selected over 100 fonds initially. And then the designer I worked with, Cecilia Berkovic, and I whittled it down to about 50, about half of what I gathered. It was things that were of interest not just to me, but I was thinking through the prospective audience who would come through, perhaps former student-artists, like the child artists that were in some of the photographs I selected. People did arrive and say, “Oh, this person taught me in this program here in Kingston.” Or a person would come in and say, “I did a cooking thing with Winsom, or I did this, or that with Winsom,” so all these wonderful stories started to unfurl in Kingston.

[Since] I was also looking at the story of Fresh Arts, what I decided to do was predate Fresh Arts and look at the origins of the Black Action Defense Committee, which was very instrumental during that time, and it predates Black Lives Matter Toronto.  And the history of how one arrives here, with whatever historical incidents that happen in your DNA when you arrive on Turtle Island. Then there’s a whole other battery of ways in which you are an uninvited guest received on Turtle Island. Whether that is the government-funded institutions like the police or formal K-12 schools or the publicly funded medical system, we have seen how these institutions have repeatedly failed non-white bodies of cultures, as well as white bodies, right? “Bodies of culture” is a term that I have learned from the social worker and somatic practitioner Resmaa Menakem, who wrote My Grandmother’s Hands; it’s not a term I came up with. So, white bodies of culture versus racialized bodies of culture, Indigenous bodies of culture, and Black bodies of culture.

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation detail. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

I was thinking through this visibility lens in terms of Winsom not only coming from Kingston, Jamaica, to Kingston, Ontario, but also establishing and bringing her young family there with her partner at the time. And then how they utilized numerous forms of education, not just in the public education system, but also as community-engaged public educators. It was just wonderful to see how she used her gifts as a visual artist, as a gifted culinary artist, and as a food justice practitioner to really make relational gathering spaces where people would come together and share, whether it was her storytelling or listening to invitational guest artists’ stories. The images were not of that sharing, but there was ephemeral documentation that these things did happen in Kingston. Then the other wall was about the Black Action Defense Committee up to and towards the Yonge Street Uprising.

[Regarding] Fresh Arts, the Yonge Street Uprising, which occurred in the summer of 1992, May 1992.[2] It was an incident in which a plainclothes police officer shot at a young Black man who was assumed to be affiliated with drugs and drug trading. Assumed is the keyword here. This narrative doesn’t change, right? It happened in the week that the verdict came out in LA about the Rodney King trials. The L.A. uprising happened in the same week, so Toronto and L.A. were both burning, literally and figuratively. I wouldn’t say fires were happening in Toronto, but they were in L.A., and there was definitely social unrest in both cities. In Toronto, there was a loss of businesses, and the very institution of policing is about protecting property, right? So, there’s a whole argument there to be analyzed around, well, what’s important?  Black lives or property?

I happened to be at the action. It was a peaceful demonstration for the day, until the Yonge Street uprising started later in the evening.  But I was not at the uprising. I was at the protest. I used the protest as a key event, and then I looked at the before and after, on one wall, the Yonge Street uprising. The Black Action Defense Committee organized the protest for the death of Raymond Constantine Lawrence, and then a look at today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

History becomes an active agent in that telling. That could have taken place in the form of a zine, but to me, I felt like I was using the walls as my substrate and then doing this gigantic mural-like zine. Those two narratives, I cannot separate my story about Winsom Winsom without talking about being at this protest [about] police brutality on Black life. It was my first public protest; about to graduate from AY Jackson Secondary School that spring, and I was just about to turn 19 that Labour Day weekend. And two years later, before I turned 21, youth of racialized communities were invited to enter Fresh Arts, and then I joined.

AB: Thank you for sharing that generous history and trajectory.

PM: I would like to stress that there’s never been an exhibit about Fresh Arts, and even around the Black Arts Movement in Canada. There hasn’t been a significant effort to bring this history together in something that can be catalogued. But I don’t think I’m the only one here sharing these narratives. As I mentioned, I’m using lived experience to tell these stories—They’re not fiction in any way.

Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid. 

PV: Your installations, specifically tere naal _ with you, seem to invite viewers into shared or communal spaces, such as the baithak (lounge) you incorporated into the exhibition. Could you talk about how you approach audience engagement when designing these immersive environments, and what role community-building plays in your overall practice?

PM: I think as a diasporic artist growing up in a South Asian household, or particularly in a Panjabi Sikh household, intergenerational sittings and gatherings are very indicative of our cultures. A lot of Pan-Asian cultures focus on tea gatherings, rituals, and ceremonies, and whatnot.

We don’t really have a tea ceremony per se, but we definitely have loads of tea time that happens, and you can have cups and cups of cha (tea) all day in Panjab, all over India, as well as in the diaspora. This is a very common thing to do, much like café culture. I reckon that café culture started in Europe, and it arrived in North America with the European settler culture. I was using the baithak space as a social sculpture, something that is more informal than western chairs and sofas. The sitting aspect is on the floor, with pillows and carpets to gather folks on and to have some much-needed respite and rest alone or in community.

What I have understood growing up watching my parents and all their peer groups is that BIPOC individuals don’t have the same playing field if we really examine labour markets and their operating systems. Who gets to rest, and who gets to just keep working, or has to? It’s not who gets to, as that implies a choice, but who has to keep working nonstop?

And often we hear this because the term self-care did not come from my culture, particularly. We have words for that, but no word says, “self-care.” That terminology came from movement elder Audre Lorde, African American thinker, writer, academic, and poet.  I was raised in that time period for Fresh Arts. I am reflecting on the second-wave Black feminist cultural producers who raised me as an artist. There’s no other way for me to address my communal gatherings of joy, grief, and solace. They’re not necessarily in a tavern or a bar, as a lot of folks in the community are sober.  It’ll be around non-alcoholic beverages, things that are specifically accustomed to our culture.

I didn’t necessarily serve during the installation; it was more of an action for holding space.  And when we talk about holding space, it’s creating that gathering space.  I’m implying, come and rest, or chill with your kids, or if you want to read a book, write, or draw, please come and do that. I was thinking through the space of the biennial: who gets to [rest]? It could be an active young family, or it could be elders.

I put two modern Adirondack chairs in there for folks who might have accessibility issues. I’m always thinking about who has access to these spaces physically, mentally, and intellectually as well. Access is not just about physicality. It’s also about all these kinds of capacities around human activity through one’s mind, body, and spirit.

The video was the one thing that I brought from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. It’s an 11-minute video that basically draws on my history on Turtle Island. Fred Moten, African American poet, thinker, writer, and academic, has a teaching strategy with his students where he asks his students when they arrive at their first meeting, “How did you get here?”  So, I use the framework of asking myself, “How did I get here?” When I think back to my past selves, how did I get here from May of 1976 and, prior to my arrival, my overall community from the early 1900s?

I delved into not just my lived experience in that 11-minute video, but I tracked the history and inquired about the history of when my people arrived and what happened after that. I go back to looking at the early 1900s, and a lot of people don’t know that over 2 million Indians were in World Wars I and II. In some ways, I’m using it as a pedagogical tool, but I don’t want to hammer it over the head. If you want to look at it through a contemporary art lens, I kind of throw that out the window. I’m going to play with all these strategies— arts pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and contemporary art design.

I am a former co-founder of the Come Up to My Room exhibit in Toronto, which lasted about 17 or 18 years, so site specificity and immersive installations were very significant in informing this work. I would say that I’m trying to disrupt the gallery space using that installation strategy, perhaps with how one would consider “community engaged.”

Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid. 

PV: I enjoyed that point about the privilege of who gets the right to rest.

PM: Exactly. Yeah, who gets that? It might be a [day off] for us today, but we’re working, right?  It’s a Sunday. A Sunday implies a lot of different things, but we’re working right now. We’re both labouring, right? Who gets to have the privilege of a Saturday and Sunday off? I’m taking my first rest from doing two careers. I’ve been a practicing artist for 31 years, and I have been a high school teacher for 21 years. It’s the first time I’m taking a break to go to grad school. I’ve been doing both full-time. In fact, I was worried about all this time/space, but my graduate seminars and TA and sessional work filled it right back up!

We’re all students of life until our very last breath.

AB: It’s quite amazing that you’re also a high school teacher. Can you expand on the role and the relationship of being an educator and how that plays into your practice a bit further?

PM: I was worried in the beginning about how full-time teaching would impact my art career. But then I realized they were interchangeable once I entered the high school classroom. It was almost like I was the visiting artist every day, but teenagers don’t see you as that. They have an idea that this is a classic high school experience. When you ask folks, “Did you love school?” You’re going to get a mixed bag of answers. But if you ask folks, “Did you love learning?”  Nobody’s going to say, “No.” Learning is a continuum. We’re all students of life until our very last breath. 

Schooling, though, is a whole different playing field because it’s about conformity; it’s about the nation-state, and how we’re taught. You’re going to go from that starting point to find your calling, your passions, and your purpose. If you look at the inception of schooling in North America, it was really from the Industrial Revolution forward. It was about getting folks in line for the masses to help generate and continue to build society. And that is going to happen with the masses, not necessarily the elite few that basically rule us. 

Once students and learners understand there’s a difference between schooling and learning, the synapses start going off. It’s like, “Yeah, I suck at this, but yeah, you’re right. I’m creative.” We have the natural ability to be creative. I think there’s a difference between looking at how education and my art practice are in some ways interchangeable and intertwinable. I look at my practice as a tapestry, rather than separating it into silos.

PV: As you develop Toronto Biennial of Art’s Zine Three, which focuses on futurities, what do you envision for the next generation of counter-archivists, activists, and artists committed to addressing underrepresentation in the arts?

PM: We’re centering Black feminist cultural producers of today in that third zine through the lens of futurities. It will be a gathering of the activities archived by the Toronto Biennial of Art. And Zine Three will focus on voices who were present during TBA24 and the resulting documentation of what happened. There was this wonderful project the storytellers made in my installation, and it was because Siki Soberetonari, one of the storytellers, said that she wanted to collect people’s responses to my question, “Who taught you to love?” What I suggested recently was that we gather all the responses and edit them because it’s about young people, zero to 100, who added their responses to the question I put up on the wall, “Who taught you to love?”  Love, meaning the idea of love and teaching. We’re talking about arts pedagogy and myself as a teaching artist; I use my art life as a form of cultural resistance.

 “Who taught you to love?” is not necessarily in the Ontario curriculum. I’m going outside of that, but it’s in my curriculum because I’m also reflecting on my relationship with Winsom Winsom. She taught me that teaching is love, which is a form of care. I’m also tuning into what I was doing and thinking with her at the time, and what she saw in me. Had she not seen me, I don’t think I’d be here today. She witnessed that I had something to offer the world and just encouraged me in a variety of ways over one summer, really.

I’m asking the public, “Who taught you to love?” and then that was recorded and taken up. The idea is that I want to build something where people can feel inspired by social change and how the arts are a fantastic tool for that, especially in a world that is so fraught right now. These are the conversations I want to hold space for. And again, thinking through that space, it was a container for all the programming that happened. I make these spaces so I can hold space for socially-engaged activations. The idea then becomes a little bit unsettling for the idea of a museum visit, a gallery visit, or a biennial visit.

Who has three hours right now? We are in an attention-deficit economy! No one has the time, or space, or bandwidth. So, when you intentionally create a space for care, when you intentionally create a zine for reflection, what can that then go on to produce for that individual or perhaps a group tomorrow or throughout the path they’re on? I’m just thinking through and around Futurities and the conversation around hope. The last conversation we had through my public programming was called Some Kind of Hope. So, it’s about hope. It will be about some kind of hope.

Check out this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art, Things Fall Apart, curated by Allison Glenn, from September 26 to December 20th, 2026.

[1] A fonds is a natural accumulation of records a person or organization makes or receives through their daily activities.

[2] For more context on the Yonge Street Uprising: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/activists-reflect-on-30-year-anniversary-yonge-street-uprising-1.6439452

Farewell Likely General: An Interview with Brooke Manning

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

By Ashley Culver

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

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

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

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

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

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

AC: What does it mean to receive those messages?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AC: Were there other rituals?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Reimagining the Gaps: Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts

Jackman Humanities Institute

September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024

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

Curated by Dallas Fellini

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

By Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

(Un)familiar Resemblances: Circularity of (un)knowing

Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces

Mayten’s Projects

Claire Heidinger, First Time Homebuyer 2022, Oil on canvas, 36″ x 30″

By Dana Snow

Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces ran from July 30th to August 16th at Mayten’s Projects, a tight gallery space in the bustling Niagara and King intersection of downtown Toronto. Opening weekend gallery goers mingled with Caribana attendees, a kaleidoscope of colour decorating the sidewalks of otherwise nondescript gray buildings. The exhibition faced an unexpected early close, leaving the particular heartbreak of losing precarious space in an expensive city that impacts emerging artists.

In Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces artists Claire Heidinger, mihyun maria kim, Natia Lemay, Par Nair, and Hau Pham refigure absence, cropping and abstracting women’s figures to relay an intimate sense of recognition. Featuring IBPOC women artists, the exhibition avoids the pitfalls of homogenizing “otherness.” Self-curated by participating artists, the exhibition acts as a call-in. What strength does refusal hold in an age of hypervisibility? I don’t have the answers to this question, but I keep revisiting the works to see if I can catch a glimpse of them between the obfuscations of the artists’ hands.

Claire Heidinger’s Pomelo is the first work to invite me into the gallery. Hanging directly beside the didactic text, the work appears as an offering into the gallery space. Waxy green leaves and bright yellow reds glimmer through the oil paint, settling into an ambiguous space between consumable and ornament. This becomes a familiar theme throughout the displayed works, echoing throughout Jade Celadon Peanuts, and Ginger with Red Patterning.

 Jade Celadon Peanuts commemorates a casual moment of the artists’ grandfather snacking and monumentalizes a shared experience of ancestral migration. A ceramic ginger root, adorned with delicate floral stippling calms the senses in the same way a ginger tea might in Ginger with Red Patterning. A more insidious connection emerges in Miss Chinese Toronto Pageant. A large-scale oil painting commemorating “Miss Silken Hair,” the work renders the winner in a celebrity glow. Her smile is a dazzling white; her freshly manicured nails atop long slender fingers posed around a bouquet and glass award. The unforgiving crop of the painting right below the subject’s eyes leads me to a clumsy first reading: she too, is to be consumed. And this is the strength of the curation and the work itself. Heidinger works on the assumptions of a colonial gaze and holds back from a one-dimensional reading. Flora, the subject, displays a “hybridized connection to ‘homeland’ in North America” in her bilingual sash, golden dress, and winner’s stance.

In her essay Inscriptions of Truth to Size, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks to the impulse for anonymity when staging one’s ‘origins’: “You can’t have a true fit, just the approximate size, a hand me down for others who must stage the same collective origin as yourself.”¹ By rendering her subjects as complicated aesthetic symbols, Heidinger pushes the discomfort of the objectifying gaze, both daring and denying viewers to replace any of her works’ subjects with their sign.

Hau Pham, It’s hard work being the Best. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hau Pham’s and Heidinger’s works speak to one another in their conceptual approach to aesthetic veneer, placed in opposition to one another in the gallery space. In a conversation with the artist, I learn that her approach to painting is informed by her approach to makeup. “The most successful thing oil paint and makeup do is to make something beautiful.” In It’s hard work being the Best, Pham captures the opulence of Buddha in a golden statue lusciously rendered in veneered brushstrokes and surrounded by orchids. Unbeknownst to the viewer, the statue has been likely spray-painted to convey this opulence. Pham begins a painting from candid shots, “they’re not always good photos,” she laughs. Using paint as a beautifying substance, the artist opens a conversation around the value of beauty standards, and the joy, labour, and entrapping of femmes to imbue that value in themselves.

Compelled by her own experience and friendships with South East Asian and East Asian women, she documents items that offer a “false liberation” to the treatment of an individual. Online as a tween, Pham felt the influence of beauty vloggers like Bubzbeauty, and felt the trappings of choice feminism. She captures this viscerally in Trapping a younger version of Myself, a found object sculpture consisting of hundred-dollar bills, a loaded vape, and a set of thick false eyelashes. Each object stands in for an element of the Buddhist philosophy: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Lashes weigh down lids, vapes keep mouths busy, and cash makes it easier to ignore weighty issues. In Fall of the French (manicure) Pham tediously renders the classic French mani in its tongue-in-cheek decay. Pham’s work places the gloss of beauty as a point of interest while denying the viewer a visible entry to the works’ true underbellies. Pham’s practice uses elements of beauty to draw the viewer in and then has them sit with feelings of what they may wish to cover up.

miyhun maria kim’s works use casting as a method of translation and obfuscation. Through the gallery entrance, one meets with your tongue goes your memory. These are hydrocal casts of faces with peacefully closed eyes, set atop hand-stitched cushions, mimicking traditional Korean headdresses. kim creates distance from the values of “duty, honour and performance” by rendering the faces in low contrast. The laborious process of creating the cushions points to the time spent processing these values.

Casting is a material method that echoes throughout many of kim’s works, from The Language of Man, a bronze cast of a bare foot pressed against a bare shoulder, installed with an Onngi and scratch paper, to 달과 말 the moon and words, a quiet and commanding installation near the gallery’s exit consisting of thirteen beeswax casts of German versions of the Korean moon jar, set atop hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper). The artist took inspiration from their various situations in multiple geographic regions for this work, drawing from “perpetual outsider experience as a Korean diaspora.” Using a translated recognition of the moon jar in a Liepzig flea market, kim cast the form in Canadian beeswax, locating their work in three regions simultaneously. Ink and hanji amplify the experience of translation, using abstractions of texts in Chinese characters, further muddying questions of formation. By using cast as translation, the artist creates new material connections to a sense of place. 화병 Squeezed hearts features wrenching ceramics seated on bamboo cushions. The viewer can see the impact of the artist’s hands constricting the clay in the process of making. The works read as the same size as human hearts. Hwa-Byung (anger disease) is an illness that affects the heart as a result of “suppress[ing] anger resulting from family conflict, so as not to jeopardize harmonious family or social relationships.” By exemplifying this internal anger in an object, kim cements the language of translation in their work.

Par Nair, a mother series, oil on wood panel, series of 12 pieces 6” x 8” each

Par Nair’s Letters of Haunting consists of two sarees whispering to one another in the slight breeze, separated by a mound of turmeric. The works are hand embroidered, a meditation on homesickness at the height of the pandemic. Embroidery, Nair told me in a previous conversation, is an inherited skill. The work puts us in touch with the maternal labour that came before us. The artists’ mother feels present in the gallery – whether it be her smeared, reworked face and translated face in her passport photos in a mother series, or her sarees, longing for her body and hanging at a monumental scale. At the show, Par let me know exactly how precarious the installation was. One fan was blowing the wrong way and the gorgeous golden spice would leave marks on the sarees. I am left with an insight on grief from a dear friend: “Sometimes, it’s not that the person is out of your life. Sometimes it’s that you know they are there, and you can’t hold them.”

Always but never dreaming exits the viewer from the gallery with the first real presence of a full figure. Swathed in creamy brushstrokes of black, the work unveils the figure of the artist through a half-eclipsed face, forearms, and foot lounging outside the covers of an overstuffed chesterfield. As one shifts around the work, the details of dream catchers, hanging coats, and weave of the blanket make themselves apparent. Lemay begins each artwork as a surface, feeling for a moment in her life where she felt constrained in the same way the surface is. The colour field works act as a literal positionality – the artist describes later to me that each work speaks to feeling confined in a space at a developmental moment in her life. As a child, she couldn’t speak to why intersections such as Blackness, Indigeneity, and girlhood had an impact on the way she was seen, but she could feel why. Blackness functions as a language of ambivalence in the works.

Natia Lemay, Always but Never Dreaming 2022, oil on canvas, 62″ x 42″

In Visibly Invisible, a little girl looks toward the edge of the circular panel, body language tense and alert, with the beads in her hair gleaming out a fire engine red. Lemay iterates to me: “Beads and braids are a Black thing, but they’re also an Indigenous thing. Why do we read them in one way, versus the other? If you are looking at the painting and seeing it as a Black person, you’re not really seeing it.” In her seminal essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity Lorraine O’Grady suggests a “both: and” ism to approaching critical subjectivity in European-Western theory – meaning that a subject can step away from the essentializing binds of defining what subjecthood can be, take what works for them, and expand.² Lemay’s paintings “poke the bear” in experiential storytelling, demanding the viewer describe what they see, and let them sit with the assumptions they make on gender, race, and life experience.

Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces is a necessary unveiling. The works demand patience, challenging viewers’ preconceived notions of beauty, consumption, presence, and visibility. Acts of obscuring figures become porous markers for recognition. Those who are looking may find themselves in the spaces left unknown.

Notes

¹Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Inscriptions of Truth to Size. Catalogue essay, Dunlop Art Gallery, 1990.

²Lorraine O’Grady. Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. AfterImage 20. No. 1 (Summer 1992).

Crossing Thresholds: 45th Parallel by Lawrence Abu Hamdan

March 26 – June 4, 2022

Mercer Union

Installation view of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel at Mercer Union, 2022 (courtesy of the artist, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

By Sarah Sarofim

Among the many exhibitions that took place in the spring of Toronto as part of the 2022 Toronto Biennale was a powerful exhibition on the violence of borders at Mercer Union. Through a film with a brilliant monologue played by Mahdi Fleifel and two large paintings, Lawrence Abu Hamdan questions the nature and frailness of—what we know to be—borders. Drawing on incidents that have taken place on the Canadian-American border, the Mexican-American border and across the Atlantic in the Middle East, 45th Parallel unravels how surveillance and visibility toy with movement across nations. 

A big component of the exhibition is a film directed by Abu Hamdan (on Zoom) that is shot inside the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a unique space that sits on the Canadian-American border. The monologue is performed in both spaces. While Fleifel stands on the stage that’s in the US, the empty room he’s talking to, full of wide wooden seats, is in Canada. A black line, probably 7 centimetres wide, is drawn throughout the space, marking a separation between Quebec and Vermont.      

The film feels like it has four acts. It starts in the library with Fleifel recounting how the space was used to smuggle guns across the borders. Two Americans bought guns in Florida and drove up to the library to get them through to Canada. Since the washrooms are accessible to both countries, one person walked through the washroom, left the arms in the third bathroom stall and Canadian Alex Vlachos took them and went back to Canada. Shots of shelves in the library and the bathroom are coupled with Fleifel’s narration. At times when we do see him, he’s sitting on a chair on one side of the black line with a table in front of him directly placed over it. The line, apparent and present, is irrelevant. Through this site and film, Abu Hamdan allows the viewer to visualize lines noting separations, before moving to two other cross-border cases, farther away from the Haskell Free Library and Opera House–where borders aren’t a black line on the ground.

Installation view of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel at Mercer Union, 2022 (courtesy of the artist, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

A woman on the stage of the Opera House playing the pedal steel on stage appears. Behind her is a backdrop of dapperly dressed people by canals in Venice that slowly begins to lift up, revealing another. If one paid close attention to the space when walking in, not eagerly passing through to get to the film, they’d realise that the backdrop is the same as one of the ones that they just passed. 

The music from the pedal steel carries on, slightly unsettling yet compelling, and the viewer can make out a large painting that says “la frontera donde debe vivir.” The slow reveal and interlude music come to an end as if announcing the start of Act II. Fleifel starts recounting the case of Sergio Adrian Hernandez, a fifteen-year-old who was shot by a US border patrol on the Juárez-El Paso border. Jesus Mesa Jr, the US border patrol was standing in the states while Hernandez, and the friends he was with, were in Mexico. The bullet crossed the border and led to the murder of the unarmed boy. 

“Though Agent Mesa’s firearm was stretched out into Mexican territory, his feet were three inches behind the American border,” Fleifel tells the camera. He re-enacts the scene while standing over the black tape in the library, marking the border between Canada and the US, as to reinforce the absurdity of a line, lethal yet invisible, at the Juárez-El Paso border.

The Supreme Court in the US, 5-4, ruled in favour of the border patrol, claiming that since he was on US soil and Hernandez died in Mexico, he could not be prosecuted in the US. The judges were concerned that ruling in favour of Hernandez would implicate complications with the US foreign policy, namely, drone strikes launched from the US in the Middle East. 

The steel pedal starts again, and another backdrop is revealed. Unlike the first two acts, Fleifel stands first on the stage listing, in great detail, the drone strikes that took place in Kabul (2018), Yemen (2013), and Makeen (2009). The camera stands behind Fleifel’s back and the audience isn’t granted the chance to look at his face. No backdrops are seen–the performance coming to an end. Fleifel’s tone is firm and demanding; “If the judges were to find Mesa guilty of this one killing, then what about the 48,308 murdered by hellfire?” 

The last act of the film brings the viewer back to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. Fleifel talks about how during Trump’s Muslim Ban the library was “one of the last little cracks in the border.” Families and friends who couldn’t leave the US in fear of not being able to get back in met their loved ones who could get a Canadian visa in the library. Instead of a no-talking sign, the library had “no burgers and extra-large cokes” signs–signs of a place of gathering. The film ends with Fleifel recounting how one of the librarians said, “we are a library, but I don’t want to shush you when you haven’t seen your grandmother in forever.” 

Installation view of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel at Mercer Union, 2022 (courtesy of the artist, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

When the film ends, the viewer gets up and walks back as they entered. They are met–again–with the painted backdrop of an aerial view of Damascus followed by the backdrop of the Juárez-El Paso border, with the writing “the border where he should have lived.” The two massive paintings of landscapes where murder and injustice have taken place, stand tall demanding one’s attention. Abu Hamdan took inspiration from the Haskell Free Opera House, where the absurdity of sitting in Canada and watching someone on stage in the US was heightened by the painted backdrop of Venice, to create the two works. 

After having watched the film, the viewer is able to take in small details and break down the scene as a whole. Backdrops don’t become the suggestion of a place, a need for a suspension of disbelief, but rather a violent space, powerful in their placement and size. I remember being in awe walking out and stopping to look at them. The painting is a political ground where neutrality is eliminated. Abu Hamdan engages with the history of landscape painting and rejects its tradition of choosing aesthetics over honouring the site and its layers. 

The ceiling where the paintings are hung made me feel like I was in a theatre, and in fact, the space is the ghost of one. 1286 Bloor Street West, now Mercer Union, used to be the home of one of Toronto’s earliest movie theatres, called the Academy Theatre. It was built in 1913 in an Edwardian style and closed around the 1960s. Mercer Union has been around since 1979 and moved a bunch before settling on Bloor Street West in 2008. The space that now hosts the exhibition has witnessed many backdrops, suspensions of belief, and theatricals. 45th Parallel, borrowing elements of theatre and film, reads as a counter-narrative to the scripts that were performed in this space–exposing the consequences of American imperialism and border enforcement violence. 

Installation view of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel at Mercer Union, 2022 (courtesy of the artist, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

This arbitrariness of borders is especially relevant to Canada, where lines drawn by the British have led to genocide. 45th Parallel was part of the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art titled What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, a continuation of the 2019 Biennale The Shoreline Dilemma. The locations chosen were an ode to the water and ravines that have mapped the city’s geography and inhabitants, that once bordered places we walked by. 

One of the central questions to the biennale is “what does it mean to be in relation?” and “45th Parallel” immerses itself in it. The exhibition does not just look at relations and their meanings but the hierarchies that exist when being in relation–a bullet, a body, a law in relation to a border, a country, a field. It looks at the dismissal and negligence of relations as well as the selectivity and decisiveness of being in relation. 

The title of the exhibition, 45th Parallel, also points to other ways of being in relation. In this case, the invisible line that treads a surface to mark it isn’t institutionalised or militant. The 45th Parallel denotes “the middle of the earth,” where every place that this abstract passes through is equidistant from the North and South pole. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House sit on this line. While latitudes are often used as tools for movements and navigation, borders are usually restrictive. They implicate race and class, and self-serve the state, never the vulnerable or the migrant. The title of the exhibition acts as a cue to question the notion of borders and their relation to land and soil. The incredibly well-written dialogue treads that line as well. The Haskell Free Library and Opera and House were referred to as the “granite and brick loophole in the longest border in the world” and the “400 metre anomaly.” This huge play on words grounded the site in its materials and reinforced the absurdity and lethal power of borders. 

Installation view of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel at Mercer Union, 2022 (courtesy of the artist, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

Today, the welcome page of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House website reads: “The library is opened [sic] for guided tours again! No family/friends reunions (cross-border visits) allowed.” What once embraced the frailness of borders, now complies with its authority.  

Abu Hamdan’s work continues to explore and reveal the neglected violence that happens across borders. One of his most recent projects is AirPressure.info, an extensive research project showing the physiological effects of aircraft noise and the extent of the Israeli air force surveillance in Lebanon post-war. Although the film in 45th Parallel speaks of a specific site, the installation grounds the work in the layered history of Toronto and is still able to highlight global injustices. The exhibition is documentative, critical, and–theoretically and linguistically–so accessible. It is an incredible example of the kind of exhibitions that are a reminder of the importance of producing and sharing work—in relation to the spaces we can or cannot navigate, the lives that we live, and the lives that could have been lived. 

Quantifying Sakoon with Tazeen Qayyum  

Sakoon by Tazeen Qayyum. Installation Views. Courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid. 2022.

Sakoon by Tazeen Qayyum

Zalucky Contemporary

February 12 to March 19, 2022

By Ignazio Colt Nicastro

Sakoon, Zameer, Brabri/Bartri, Yaqeen, Sabr, Hasil, Zarf, and Fikr are nine Urdu words meticulously drawn out through intensive, repetitive labor by Pakistani-Canadian artist, Tazeen Qayyum. These nine words encompass the walls of the Zalucky Contemporary, each evoking a personal reaction from Qayyum. Visually, the echoing Urdu characters wrap in an annular structure with a calligraphic form on sheets of paper, swirling towards the center like a vortex. In her debut Toronto solo exhibition, Sakoon, Qayyum engages viewers with this series of ink drawings that speak to her relationship with Urdu linguistics and her exploration of these words. 

Qayyum presents the work linearly across the gallery, providing rough translations of these Urdu words that are meant to illustrate something quantifiable. When viewers enter Zalucky Contemporary, they are met with the first work and the title of the show: Sakoon, meaning Peace/Calm/Tranquility, which sets the tone of the exhibition. To truly immerse oneself in this space, it is essential to understand that Urdu is not always meant to be consumed literally. With this in mind, viewers can now see that Qayyum is inviting them to dig deeper within themselves and to seek the quantity of tranquility within and around themselves.

Sakoon by Tazeen Qayyum. Installation Views. Courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid. 2022.

Next to this introductory piece, viewers are met with a triptych that harnesses a deeper presence thematically and visually in the space. From left to right, viewers stand ahead of Zameer (Conscience), Brabri/Bartri (Equality/Privilege), and Yaqeen (Belief). These three works are synergetic, as sentiments of equality and privilege cannot be discussed without having an underlying conversation of one’s conscience and beliefs. Surprisingly, these works were not made for one another, but over time Qayyum found a shared theme between them. This sequence of drawings forms a dialogue around the centerpiece of Brabri/Bartri. 

As a woman of colour, Qayyum found herself placed within emotional, personal, and public turmoil during the rise of heightened civil rights movements in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Furthermore, as an artist, Qayyum reflected on the performativity of statements of solidarity that appeared from art institutions across the globe during this time. Screens of text flooded Instagram, Facebook, and arts-based platforms, yet it begged the question, why did these institutions feel the need to prove their core values? Are their values as an institution not visible through their actions? Qayyum began to question her own place in the art community as these statements began to feel more like a checklist rather than a statement of integrity. When connecting with art spaces, she now wondered what was being assessed: her merit or the colour of her skin. As these thoughts came to surface, Qayyum turned to her practice to reflect on these feelings. 

Sakoon by Tazeen Qayyum. Installation Views. Courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid. 2022.

Out of these experiences, Qayyum pulled out two contradicting words that exist within each other’s opposition, as the unbalance of privilege cannot subsist in an equal world.These words work against but also alongside each other, just as they do in the ink drawing Brabri/Bartri. As she does for almost all of her works, Qayyum began in the middle of the page, drawing Brabri (Equality) in black ink in a circular, clockwise direction. As she reached the end of this section, she then inverted the experience. Now drawing in white ink and counter-clockwise, Qayyum fills the page with Bartri (Privilege). She continues to do this for another five rounds, purely in black ink, filling the page with this new vessel of equality and privilege. It is the laborious act of repetition and rhythm that allowed Qayyum to turn from moments of disparity into a meditative trance. 

As time went on, more world issues were raised or persisted, furthering this claim to Brabri/Bartri. The rampant development of COVID-19 highlighted the disparities within marginalized communities, further exposing how our judicial systems overlook and reinforce structural violence against those who do not fit the quota of cis-gendered, straight, white, able-bodied, men or women. Qayyum pondered on the quantity of Zameer (Conscience) and Yaqeen (Belief) in society while considering this imbalance. In response, she is asking her viewers to consider their Bartri (Privilege) in order to obtain Brabri (Equality).

Sakoon by Tazeen Qayyum. Fikr (concern/thought), 2022 Archival ink on paper 29.5 x 23.25 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid

As these older works of Qayyum’s still resonate with audiences today, her newest piece, Fikr (Concern/thought) continues the series that speaks to her audiences and herself. Looking at this word closely, viewers should consider how deeply they reflect on the world around them. What is interesting about this piece, however, is Qayyum’s execution of the work. As aforementioned, Qayyum’s previous works are created from the center to the exterior. This was because the word choice itself was often a result from the world around her. Although Qayyum’s work often encourages her viewers to contemplate the phrases ahead of them, when she created Fikr she decided to focus inwards on herself. Even after finding solace in her therapeutic practice, Qayyum joins her viewers as we all seek Sakoon. 

A Method of Attunement: In Conversation with Candice Hopkins

Portrait of Candice Hopkins.

Interview by Adi Berardini

The focus and mandate of The Toronto Biennial of Art is to “make contemporary art accessible to everyone.” From March 26 to June 5th, local, national, and international Biennial artists will transform Toronto and its partner regions with free exhibitions, performances, and learning opportunities. Although the Biennial has its roots in diverse local contexts, it sparks global conversations through its exhibitions and city-wide programming. This year’s Biennial has the theme What Water Knows, the Land Remembers, expanding from the inaugural 2019 edition, A Shoreline Dilemma. In this interview, Candice Hopkins discusses her curatorial vision for the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art and her exhibition ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision at the Textile Museum of Canada. Within the conversation, Hopkins speaks of the importance of the Biennial being place-specific and curatorial practice as a method of attunement.

Candice Hopkins’ writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon, Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. In addition to her role as senior curator for the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Toronto Biennial, she works as the Executive Director of Forge Project in New York. Additionally, she was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She is co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.

Can you explain your curatorial vision for the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, with the theme of What Water Knows, The Land Remembers? How does it expand on the last edition focusing on the shoreline? 

We’re a team of three curators myself, Katie Lawson, Tairone Bastien, and we also worked on the first edition. We always knew from the beginning that the curatorial team would carry over. And we always imagined that 2019, and what’s now 2022 because of the six-month delay of the pandemic, [would be] two chapters and two editions of a whole. That means that some of the artists extend their projects over 2019 and 2022 with a thematic extension as well. The title of 2019 was A Shoreline Dilemma, and most of the venues were centered on the shoreline and the shoreline as spaces of imagination, colonial construction, militarization and demilitarization, [and] various kinds of expansion into the lake. Also, shorelines aren’t fixed; they’re constantly shifting and moving, they’re fractal. And because of their fractal nature, they resist any conventional forms of measurement, because they are constantly changing space. We see the 2022 edition as stemming from these initial questions.

The 2019 Biennial was centered around the question of what does it mean to be in relation? In 2022, we thought it was important to think about how in this case, many of the works are situated up the various tributaries of those lost and extant rivers in Toronto. Toronto is located on one of the largest natural watersheds in the world, which means that there were a lot of creeks and there were a lot of rivers that were feeding that lake. We have been thinking collectively together with artists and curators what does it mean to be in relation to the water? And through that, what does it mean to think about the kind of deeper and in some cases, the sediment of history, on this land that we’re on?

In 2022, the title is meant to be a kind of lead into some of the explorations various artists were taking on, what water knows, the land remembers. One of the things that we were struck by when we were meeting and speaking with artists was one, as far as we understand it, water has memory. It contains and remembers anything that has happened to it on a molecular level. So, we can understand water as an archive, but we can understand the land as an archive too. Last fall, I was part of a meeting with a soil scientist who’s at Duke University and he said, certain soils slowly move upwards, like a river, over in some cases thousands of years. In a way then, it’s almost as though the soil is constantly revealing its past to us if it’s left undisturbed.

What does it mean to attune ourselves to these histories that might be located under concrete, underneath our very feet? 

That was a moment of revelation for me and the curatorial team that if the land was always trying to reveal its history to us, what does it mean to attune ourselves to that? What does it mean to attune ourselves to these histories that might be located under concrete, underneath our very feet? I think one of the projects that we first initiated in 2019 that carried towards 2022 is a kind of direct response to this. So, that was what’s called Concepts and Contexts for Toronto and that was authored by Ange Loft with various collaborators. Ange Loft is a Mohawk artist, historian, playwright, and theatre director. And this year in 2022, we have been working together with Camille Turner and Yaniya Lee to add a kind of another layer to this idea of concepts and contexts for Toronto. They’ve been working on, a set of cards, like a deck, that looks at Black histories in Toronto. And one of the things that Yaniya and Camille noted was that these aren’t sedimented histories—that’s kind of an easy way out. They were saying that these pasts and these futures are right here in front of us, but not everyone pays attention to them. Sometimes we think that these histories are obscured, whether it’s the histories of people who are newcomers to these lands, or people who’ve been here for thousands of years, but they’re not for the people who’ve lived those histories.

We’ve also been very inspired by the fugitivity of water. The fact that even though something like Taddle Creek or Garrison Creek has been covered over, water still always finds a way home. It flows underneath houses, underneath real estate developments, it erodes concrete, it continues to flow. We thought of that fugitivity of water and what it carries with it and its insistence on its path. And I think that’s what we can learn, not only as curators but as artists too.

Jeffrey Gibson, I AM YOUR RELATIVE, 2022. Installation views, MOCA Toronto. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Roberts Projects, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Stephen Friedman Gallery. I AM YOUR RELATIVE is co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art.

What are some considerations you have curating a biennial that’s place-specific, such as the Toronto Biennial? And a place that’s so diverse too. Do you have specific aspects you look for in artists and work and how it connects to place?

We knew that on embarking on the Toronto Biennial from the beginning, it needed to be place-specific. It couldn’t feel like an exhibition that could take place anywhere, it had to be done in relation to place. Whether that’s thinking about histories or various ways that we might shape the narrative of a place for ourselves. When we started in 2019, we brought artists together, especially those who were coming from outside of Toronto together with artists that were here. They met with Ange Loft, who generously shared some of the research she had done. And that Toronto context from Concepts brief was shared with all the artists who were working with the Toronto Biennial of Art as a kind of primary document. I think it’s really important to share histories, knowledge, and tools about a place. The pandemic shifted working models; we all went online like many teams. We worked with artists remotely, of course, some are still based here. A big part of that was being in dialogue.

Many of the artists that we worked with have created responsive works to this place or the Great Lakes, more in general, or to other narratives of lakes such as Great Bear Lake in Northwest Territories is one good example of work by Ts̱ēmā Igharas and Erin Siddall. Other projects looked very far into the future, such as part two of Syrus Marcus Ware’s Antarctica piece. I think every artist took it from their own perspective, but I think [most of the] work is grounded here. Part of that idea though was because a lot of biennials operate almost like a parachuting model that let’s say emerged in the 1990s with the proliferation of biennials around the world. What started with less than a hundred, is now I believe over 400 around the world. And there needs to be specificity to those, they can’t feel like there’s very little relation. I think audiences feel that too. One of our methods as well is that we are primarily a commissioning biennial, which differentiates us from some others.

Installation view of ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. Photo by Darren Rigo.

Can you discuss the Biennial exhibition ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision that you curated at the Textile Museum of Canada and its focus on sharing Inuit histories?

In early 2013, I did travel to different communities in Nunavut, including Baker Lake. And I had already known, of course about ᔭᓯ ᐆᓇᖅ Jessie Oonark’s work, ᔮᓂᑦ ᑭᒍᓯᐅᖅ Janet [Kigusiuq]’s work, and ᕕᒃᑐᕆᔭ ᒪᒻᖑᖅᓱᐊᓗᒃ Victoria Mamnguqsualuk’s work. What I found when I was in Baker Lake was this matriarchy—The way that a lot of artistic production in Nunavut is done through mentorship, artist to artist, family member to family member, sometimes with the support of the co-op system, sometimes not. And the co-op in Baker Lake kind of operated in fits and starts. It was really production led by artists themselves. Jessie Oonark began making work only after she and her family relocated to Baker Lake. Baker Lake, as far as I know, is the only inland community in Nunavut so it’s not on a major water body, like other communities. And I was interested in how women’s perspectives were shaping the content of their work and how they made the work itself.

Installation view of ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. Photo by Darren Rigo.

Jessie is primarily known for her textile work. She’s the only artist from Baker Lake to be included in the Cape Dorset print collection and she had her first prints included in 1960. They’ve all worked across media, drawing, prints, textiles, some sculpture even. What I was interested in was how pattern is both a tool and a technique for all of them. Janet later in her life, when arthritis didn’t allow her to make the kind of very high detailed drawings that she was known for began a different kind of practice. It began through a workshop in 1998 I think, with someone who was up there for a time teaching, making these paper collages. They are extraordinary because people might see them immediately as pure abstraction, but they’re not. Many of Janet’s collages are made to reference very specific places that they would visit, places where they’ve fished, for example.

Then Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, Jessie’s other daughter, was known for her narrative works. A figure that recurs in her practice is a migrant traveler–Kiviuq. He occurs a lot in her work and even intervened at certain moments like in the cold war. He’s a figurative legend, let’s say. [What is] fascinating to me about that was that Janet said in an interview that Victoria would stay up late at night, listening to their grandmother, Natak, tell stories. In a way, she became a chronicler through her prints and drawings, and textiles, of this oral history, which is fascinating. And then their mother, Jessie Oonark, is one of the best-known Inuk artists to have lived. What really struck me was the repeated representations of women, the tools of women, including the ᐅᓗ Ulu women’s knife, ᐊᑯᖅ amauti, ᖃᒧᑏᒃ qamutiik; and how pattern for her, again, became a kind of tool and technique, particularly in her textile works. But the title of the exhibition, in general, comes from, and I believe it was Jack Butler who said this, he described Jessie Oonark’s work as “double vision” because she used a lot of symmetry, but it was, I think quite deliberately, not perfect symmetries, so each side might look slightly different. In a way, what that does is it makes you pay attention to the variation of form. I feel like as the central point of the Biennial, we have a lot of matriarchal and matrilineal narratives. And I think that’s why Double Vision is one of the centerpiece exhibitions of the 2022 Biennial.

I also feel like personally, the work of Inuit artists isn’t always contextualized in this way, although increasingly more now. I wanted the audience to focus not just on the content of the work, but the kind of conditions of production in Baker Lake, who is teaching who, how they are communicating it, and seeing these pieces as a conceptual marker of art history.

Installation view of ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. Photo by Darren Rigo.

Can you speak more about the practice of collaboration and listening in your curatorial practice and its significance while showcasing work by Indigenous artists and artists whose histories have been underrepresented?

I think sometimes curatorial practice is about resonances. We can understand resonances as part of an auditory experience, but also in many ways, curatorial practice can be a method of attunement. You’re attuned to not only what is taking place in society at any given moment, but [you are also] attuned to what artists are interested in communicating with their work. I think that you’re attuned to what ideas are forming and your potential audiences for an exhibition too. As well as the kind of practicalities of putting together a show in multiple venues where there’s different relations being formed in each of the spaces.

I think as well, and this happens very distinctly in the first edition of the Biennial too, we wanted to work directly with artists whose practices we were most excited about, of course. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the artists that we worked with had a kind of corresponding place within what we might consider the larger artistic ecosystem. So, sometimes they might not have any commercial representation, for example, or maybe they’re just starting in their career. I think these kinds of exhibitions can be platforms for artists to make something new, for artists to make something responsive and I think for myself, paying attention to people who are making good, challenging work. We can use the exhibition as a kind of stage or a platform for what they’re making and doing. I think as well, curatorial practice is inherently dialogical. It’s in relationship to the ethos of our time, working in tandem with an artist as they develop something new.

Do you have any advice for emerging Indigenous artists or curators starting off their careers?

There are two different answers depending on whether you’re looking to pursue more of a curatorial track or an artist track. And that’s not to say that the two aren’t contingent or that people do both, because often people do both. I started out as an artist, for example.

I would say that for emerging curators, mentors have been the most important figures in my life and they sometimes come to you in expected ways. When I was very early in my career, I was grateful to have been mentored by folks like Lee-Ann Martin or Anthony Kiendl, or Sylvie Gilbert . I was able to work alongside them through my work at the Banff Centre. And I started at the Banff Centre as a work-study, that’s essentially like an intern. I think that we all start in various ways. I was incredibly lucky to have received a grant through the Canada Council for the Arts at the time. It was a grant that was for emerging Aboriginal curators, that was the terminology then.

I worked directly with Lee-Ann, and I learned so much from her, you know, she was one of the co-curators of Indigena, which is still a watershed exhibition. It was kind of like the political foil to Land, Spirit, Power that was on at the same time at the National Gallery of Canada, just across the river from one another.  She was both the person who was one of the Project Coordinators for the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples that was in the 1990s that emerged out of the kind of conflicts and direct open protests around the exhibition The Spirits Sings in 1988, which was one of the first publicly protested exhibitions. So, she was one of the people at the forefront of trying to negotiate a different relationship between Native people and museums and our representation.

Choose your mentors and work with them, and these relationships are always reciprocal, right? What can you give in exchange or provide as an exchange? I’m not implying monetary of course. Developing relationships with artists is incredibly important as a young curator, because those are your peers, and they might be people that you work with for the rest of your life in various ways. That’s definitely been the case for me.

I would say as well, understanding if you do want to work with museums or artist-run centers, or other alternative or commercial spaces, trying to find out how they function is important too. I think that these institutions are not always transparent, they don’t always speak from that subject position at all. I think any experience you can get within those places is always beneficial.

If you’re an emerging Native artist, do whatever you can to make sure that you can maintain a dedicated studio practice, even if your studio is your desk. It’s important to put a lot of energy into your work. Find out what kinds of funding opportunities are out there if you’re living and working in Canada, which is a very different funding landscape that the United States. I would say, think of your peers as you’re sounding board.

I always encourage people, and this might be intimidating for younger artists, to reach out to a curator. If there’s a curator you like, send them your work, and see if they’ll do a studio visit with you, with no expectation. What you’re trying to do is develop a dialogue and a relationship. As a young artist, I think it’s incredibly important to see as much work by others as you can, especially those artists that you respect so that you can learn from how work is installed. You can learn from one another, including other ways other [artists] might be contextualizing their work. This is your field. Spend as much time looking and watching as learning as you can.

Check out the Toronto Biennial of Art from March 26th to June 5th, 2022 at the 9+ Biennial sites across Toronto and Mississauga.