B.5.1 Multi-sensory Collection as Queer Crip Curating

• Liang-Kai Yu, Maastricht University

Recent years have witnessed a rising scholarly discussion over curatorial and museum activism informed by intersectional body politics such as decolonial, gender, sex, and disability movements (Amanda Cachia 2013; Sumaya Kassim 2017; Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin 2020). Feminist art historian Maura Reilly (2018) has outlined that “leveling hierarchies, challenging assumptions, countering erasure, promoting the margins over the center, disseminating new knowledge, and encouraging strategies of resistance” has become the core tasks of the “curatorial activist”. While curatorial activism as such might begin with revising the artistic canon through inclusive visual representation and collection acquisition, this paper alternatively explores a multisensory approach towards the existent artwork and visitor’s body in the exhibition space. The Van Abbemuseum’s latest display of its permanent art collection Relinking and Delinking is a case in point. Through sensory tools such as tactile artworks, scented cards, braille codes, and audio guides produced in close collaboration with queer art workers and art workers with various disabilities, the curatorial team aims to transform the modernist Dutch art collection into a decolonial and intersectional art history. This collaborative curating results in experimental displays such as touchable walls and artworks that create an intimate encounter between transnational Cubism, fragrance cards for a painting of male bathers that evoke queer desire, and audio guides as sound-based performance that enable crip disruption of visitor’s experience. These displays do not only diversify the art collection on display but experiment with queer and disabled ways of experiencing the artwork. Drawing on queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s (2006) spatial notion of orientation and disorientation that problematizes the normative body-object relation in space, I suggest that Relinking and Delinking mobilizes queer and crip encounters between the artwork and visitor’s body, thereby potentially disrupting the normative body assumed in the white cube gallery viewing.

keywords: multi-sensory collection, queering, disabling, curatorial activism, tactile displays

B.5.2 The Search for Utopia: Migration, Labour and its Descendants

Sujeet Sennik, OCAD University

There is a photographic archive housed on the island of Mauritius which is unique in the world. It is a record of indentured labourers who were officially taken in portrait for government record when photography was in its nascency. Scholarship involving this collection has focussed on anthropology and labour. I propose a parallel reading; as a Mauritian/Canadian, queer, multidisciplinary artist and researcher, I would like to address my ancestors who live in the archive. I plan on animating these archives by incorporating queer theory, an art practice that uses sugar as a medium to reference the historic sugar plantations on the island, traditional textiles, and photography. The hauntology of what is left in the empty spaces of the archive is something I will be exploring in an attempt to extrapolate potential utopia(s) resonating from the island.

The Indentured Labour Archives are imbued with multiple meanings, both political and sociological. Being left in a Republic by its former colonisers begs the question: Who does the archive serve now and in what ways has the anthropological focus on ethnicity interpreted its complexity?

As someone who has engaged in labour rights in the textile sector, I can’t help but draw parallels within the sugar industrial complex that led to the colonization of Mauritius, and the fashion industrial complex of today that in many cases relies on extractive labour. As a queer artist with current family and ancestral ties to the Island, my vantage point uniquely enables me to discern details within this archive which are lost without the concurrent understanding of political and social life in Mauritius in the wake of French then British colonialism. I am this archive, my ancestors remain within it, and I am privileged today because of the deep research I am able to conduct regarding a collective colonial exploitation experienced in Mauritius.

keywords: intersectional feminism, queer theory, interdisciplinary research creation, photographic archive, migratory labour

B.5.3 « Abaporu » 's Colonial Body: tempering suffering with joy and pleasure

Anelise Wesolowski-Molina, University of Ottawa

The colonial body is usually depicted through their suffering, trauma and, most importantly, through the invader's gaze. Damage-centered research is the primary source of knowledge about how the colonial wound was never completely healed, supposedly traumatizing the colonial body forever. My proposal explores how to temper the suffering with joy, producing the space needed to regenerate individual and collective bodies damaged by colonization. I will work with three main points. I begin by problematizing the Damage-Centered vision to bring to the surface how the colonial body, both individual and social, has been seen. In my second point, I develop some thoughts about how the colonial body can experience desire, joy, and pleasure. Lastly, I demonstrate how the joyful body can appear, as well as how this body is viewed and interpreted. Here I will bring the most important Brazilian painting, "Abaporu," from Tarcila do Amaral. Abaporu's figure will reveal some interesting things about this joyful body and potential futures. My proposal also demonstrates how it is possible to expand the vision of this (and other) painting using "Cuir" studies and other gender theories from Latin America. I will work with Black, Indigenous and Decolonial Feminist Theories from Katherine McKittrick, Harsha Walia, Robyn Maynard, Leanne B. Simpson, and Ann Russo. Leanne B. Simpson, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, Angie Morrill, Wayne K. Yang, Dian Million. The Brazilian researcher Larissa Pelucio and other contemporary Latin American thinkers will help me reflect on desire, pleasure, fluidity, and the future. The main objective of this paper is to nurture a fruitful discussion about the future of Gender, having as the point of reference undervalued epistemologies, Global South art, lived experience and embodied theory.

keywords: gender studies, Abaporu, body, anticolonial, futurity

B.5.4 Another Look at Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude

John Geoghegan, McMichael Canadian Art Collection

John Geoghegan was recently hired as Associate Curator, Collections & Research at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He earned a Masters of Art History from York University in 2022 where his Major Research Paper focused on the life and work of Lilias Torrance Newton. He is the former senior editor of the Inuit Art Quarterly, where he worked from 2016-2020. He has contributed writing to publications for the McMichael, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, among others. John is interested in uncovering lost or forgotten histories in Canadian art history through rigorous archival research.

It is widely known that Lilias Torrance Newton's now infamous Nude faced censorship in the 1930s and was removed from the Canadian Group of Painters exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1933. But the history of the controversial painting, and adverse reaction to it, have continued into the 21st century. The painting was acquired by Alice and Vincent Massey in 1934, and upon Vincent Massey's death in 1967, was one of the nearly 150 Canadian paintings from his collection that was offered to the National Gallery. NGC Chief Curator R.H. Hubbard selected 92 of the paintings that now comprise the Vincent Massey Bequest. Nude was not among them, and the painting was offered on the secondary market.

The painting was sold again in 2001 and was acquired by Ken Thomson. The painting was included in publications and exhibitions as being a part of the Thomson Collection, but when works from the collection were donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Nude was not among them. The work is currently privately held once again.

This paper proposes that Torrance Newton's Nude has faced censorship and resisted being collected by major institutions because of its queer themes. I examine the painting's history and censorship and compare it to other works that faced censorship and controversy at the time, as well as examine Torrance Newton's relationships with other queer artists, notably Florence Wyle. This paper is highly personal and experimental, it is guided by affect, instinct, and my own visceral response to the work of Torrance Newton. Ultimately, this paper does not suggest that Torrance Newton herself was lesbian or queer, but rather explores how her works and their histories can hold additional meaning when viewed from a queer perspective, particularly for LGBTQQIPAA2S people.

keywords: queer, affect, hidden, narrative, speculative