Reading Group

Gives-on-and-with Reading Group

21 January
11 March 2021

Three decades ago, Édouard Glissant proposed in Poetics of Relation that our responsibility to remember is greater than our own history. In our decolonial times and globalizing art locales, this potentializing responsibility remains clumsy and out of reach. This project asks, “How can we make the work of transcultural relation central in the production of global art (or artwork that travels) in ways that both value and deconstruct historical knowledge in the same order?”

This two-part exhibition is durational, polylogical, and writerly. As part of the first iteration at Or Gallery, artists will lead weekly sessions where they will apply selected readings to discussions of their research, works-in-progress, or ‘dreaming’ projects. The aim of this discursive format is to use desire, contradiction, and process to give knowledge on, and with, others.

Over the course of the exhibition, Or Gallery will present works of art by featured artists in an accumulative fashion. This process will unfold alongside the weekly sessions and be completed by the end of the exhibition run on March 15, 2021.

 

READING GROUP AND PUBLIC EVENT SCHEDULE

All events will take place online and are free to attend. All times are in Pacific Standard Time.

Opening Reception – Friday January 15, 10:00am

Reading group led by Zinnia Naqvi – Thursday January 21, 12:00pm

Reading group led by Ayman Alazraq – Thursday January 28, 12:00pm

Curatorial Talk by Noor Bhangu – Thursday February 4, 12:00pm

Reading group led by Luanda Carneiro Jacoel – Thursday February 11, 12:00pm

Performance by Luanda Carneiro Jacoel | Vancouver Art Gallery Art Connects, with Noor Bhangu and Or Gallery – Thursday February 18, 1:00pm

Reading group led by GLAM Collective – Thursday March 4, 10:00am

Reading group led by Mariana Muñoz Gomez – Thursday March 11, 12:00pm

Participant Bios

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. Her curatorial practice includes the projects: Overlapping Violent Histories: A Curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge (2018), womenofcolour@soagallery (2018), Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art (2018), and Digitalia (2019). In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York University in Toronto.

Ayman Alazraq makes films, photos, and mixed media artworks. His short film The Passport was screened at the National Museum of Cinema in Turin (Italy) and the Cologne International Video Art Festival (Germany) among other places. His video and photography installation You From Now On Are Not Yourself was screened in venues in Spain, Norway, Denmark, and the Gaza Strip. In 2015, Alazraq’s short film Oslo Syndrome was presented in the autumn exhibition in Oslo, Dubai International Film Festival, and London Palestinian film festival. His collaborative work with Emanuel Svedin was shown at Galleri Podium in Oslo and Theaterhaus Jena in Germany in 2017. Alazraq and Svedin were awarded a permanent public art installation at Høgskolen på Vestlandet, which was inaugurated in 2019.

Zinnia Naqvi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, language, and gender through the use of photography, video, writing, and archival material. Recent works have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. Her works often invite the viewer to question her process and working methods.

Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally. She received an honorable mention at the 2017 Karachi Biennale in Pakistan and was an Artist in Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group. She is a recipient of the 2019 New Generation Photography Award organized by the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada in partnership with Scotiabank. She earned a BFA in Photography Studies from Ryerson University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University.

Luanda Carneiro Jacoel is a dancer-performer seeking to update questions about body-memory, the archive, identity and cultural background. Her work crosses boundaries between avant-garde performance, ritual, installation, and site-specific approaches. Currently, she is completing a Masters in Performance at the Norwegian Theater Academy and has a Bachelors Degree in Communication of Performing Arts from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil. She is co-founder of the platform ACTS laboratory for performance practices in Oslo, fomenting development among transnational artists, producing and promoting art-related events and performances.

GLAM Collective (Dr. Carla Taunton, Dr. Julie Nagam, Dr. Heather Igloliorte) is a collective of scholars who work on and through Indigenous theory and methodologies, public art, performance art, digital technologies, and curatorial and artistic practices that engage with space and place. GLAM Collective was founded 2018, but its members have

more than a decade of prior experience of collaboration through publications, exhibitions, research-creation projects, presentations, symposia, workshops and other initiatives. Notably, in 2016 GLAM co-edited the special issue PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital, and throughout 2018 and 2019 they co-curated the three-part, nation-wide artist incubator and public art exhibition series, Memory Keepers, in the cities of Montreal, Charlottetown, and Halifax, as well as Gathering Across Moana (2019) in Toronto. GLAM Collective’s project, The Space Between Us, explores how digital and new media art created through innovative incubator labs, workshops, makerspaces and symposia might create new paradigms for community engagement extending to remote and rural communities both nationally and abroad.

Mariana Muñoz Gomez is a Latinx artist, writer, curator, and settler of colour based on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her work is concerned with language, place, identity, diaspora, and displacement within post- and settler colonial contexts. Her lens-based practice involves a variety of media including text works, screen-prints, and photography. Mariana works collaboratively with a number of collectives including Carnation Zine and window winnipeg. She recently completed a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg.

Video Documentation