F.6.1 Critical Curating, Decolonial Practice: Protest and Pedagogy and the "Sir George Williams Affair"

Christiana Abraham, Concordia University

This paper discusses the archival exhibition process related to Protest and Pedagogy: Representation Meanings and Memories, an exhibition held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the "Sir George Williams Affair." The paper revisits the curating process through the lens of critical, decolonial, and resistive approaches that allow a rare glimpse into the archival records related to the 1969 event, Canada's most notorious student uprising, where students took over the seventh- and ninth-floor computer centre to protest anti-black racism in the classroom at Sir George Williams University. By revisiting these events fifty years later, the exhibition asked: What do these archival materials say to us today? This paper reinterprets the exhibition-making process as it challenges existing accounts of the "affair" that have focused on labelling the student action as violence, riot, emphasizing material damages, or tied to discourses of revolution through deliberate practices of subversion. In exchange, it highlights lesser-known narratives through images, sounds, newspaper accounts, official documents, and oral testimonies that bring the archives to life.

This paper is interested in ways in which critical, engaged, curating approaches enable a re-reading of these events. It asks: how can such an exhibition enable a re-interpretation and re-telling of the "Sir George Williams Affair"? The exhibition's functioning as the pedagogic practice allows reflection on alternative methodologies that challenge visual practices and opportunities for teaching-learning and dialogue.

F.6.2 Reflecting on Grasping at the Roots

Christina Battle, Independent Artist and Curator

Grasping at the Roots was an exhibition organized for the Mitchell Art Gallery (Edmonton, Alberta) in early 2020. Featuring works by Eugenio Salas, Debbie Ebanks Schlums, Serena Lee, Shawn Tse, and with video by Scott Portingale, the exhibition took cues from mycorrhizae, mutually beneficial associations between fungi and plants. Fungi have the ability to enhance nutrient take up in plant roots, ensuring healthy development; in return, they benefit by absorbing the plant carbohydrates they require to sustain growth. The exhibition looked, not only to strategies artists use to support and sustain relationships with those they work with, but also to curatorial strategies that might, in turn, better support artists. Grasping at the Roots operated from the premise that this strategy of care has the ability to foster and develop community in sustainable and meaningful ways.

Artists in the exhibition privilege participation and working intimately with others as a critical part of artistic practice. In a time when many — especially those on the margins — face real-life threats and challenges, these artists prioritize community-building and engaged relationships built on responsibility and care. Grasping at the Roots began with the critical question of how to represent such works for the space of the gallery, which are, at their core, performative, site and time-specific. These works are in intimate relation with the participants they engage with; thus, strategies for presenting to others are critical to consider. I wondered how to translate the urgency, energy and intimacy at the heart of each work into the space of the static and how to ensure that each project's sense of site and community remained in central focus. I wondered: how should an audience come to these works? What nuances of engagement need to be provided in order to allow for an expansive reading within the space of the gallery?

F.6.3 Alongside but at a Distance: Feminist Approaches to Curating, Mentorship, and Expertise

Gabrielle Moser, York University

Since 2016, the feminist working group EMILIA-AMALIA has been meeting monthly to read and write, organize film screenings and public talks, publish chapbooks and record oral histories, build archives and eat meals together. As a collective of eight writers, curators, artists and designers that operates without sustaining funding, E-A partners with galleries, museums, artist-run centres, film distributors and art book fairs to make our programming possible. Our relationship with institutions is, therefore, one of proximity and distance: we work closely but temporarily with organizations, often redistributing the resources available to us to BIPOC, women, trans and queer arts workers so they can realize unfinished projects, share their expertise and organize their thoughts in public.

The practice of affidamento, or entrustment, is central to everything EMILIA-AMALIA does. First identified by the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective in the 1970s, relationships of affidamento acknowledge disparities — rather than similarities — between women and use the differences in their competencies, skills, and lived experience as a generative force in their friendships. Affidamento, therefore, rejects the horizontal "sisterhood" of Anglo-American feminism and opens up the productive potential of intersectional differences. Witnessing and narrating one another's life is integral to affidamento, giving these relationships a public function as well as an intimate, private one. In this way, affidamento — much like E-A's relationship with institutions — involves a relationship of working alongside, but at a distance, from one another, recognizing and validating the other's different needs and desires.

This paper reflects on the varied strategies E-A has deployed over the past four years to embed affidamento into our curatorial work, treating galleries as spaces for intergenerational knowledge transmission. Focusing on three sessions that invited younger and older feminist practitioners to shape our programming — including a curated film screening about motherhood and death, a writing workshop about dreams from prison, and a reading group and screening about feminist killjoys and cancel culture — I chart the ways Italian feminist philosophy has informed the group's pedagogical work. In so doing, the paper theorizes gallery spaces as spaces of pedagogical participation which, as curator Irit Rogoff writes, are "generated by unconscious strategies of self-staging" that exceed what both galleries and universities imagine as possible for their visitors.

F.6.4 A Museum for Future Fossils

• Eugenia Kisin, New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• Kirsty Robertson, Western University

A Museum for Future Fossils — a title that references paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz's 2016 observation that plastics will be the fossils of the future — is the name of an ongoing series of pedagogical projects and events dedicated to thinking curatorially about the Anthropocene and climate emergency. MFFF is a speculative and vernacular "institution" wherein planetary futures can be imagined, debated, and interrogated. The vernacular "museum" began in 2018 and thus far has included undergraduate classes, art exhibitions, workshops, talks, and a graduate summer school. Our main question is: how can artists, curators, scholars and others learn from each other and work together (or apart) to question and unsettle accepted patterns of learning, thinking, and action when it comes to the ecological crisis? Co-written by MFFF organizers, this paper offers a critical reflection on the process of collaboration across mediums, spaces, and disciplines. We ask what it means, theoretically and practically, to undertake a pedagogical and museological experiment that is informed by land-based pedagogy and models of civic engagement around art-science activisms. Exploring how histories of migration and settlement intersect with extractive regimes — of resources and knowledge — we analyze how and why community-based practice and kin-making are becoming art world norms.