F.1 The Impact of Afrofuturism and the Black Lives Movement on Canadian Art
Fri Oct 28 / 11:00 – 12:30 / Great Hall, rm 1022, Hart House
chairs /
- Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University
- Nicholas Raffoul, Concordia University
This panel seeks to bring together early-career to established scholars, artists, activists, and cultural organizers based in Canada who locate their research and/or practice at the intersections of Afrofuturism and the Black Lives Matter movement. Prioritizing BIPOC voices, creativity, and discourses in formation, we invite proposals on topics including, but not limited to historical flashpoints of convergence, antagonism, or incommensurability (presumed or otherwise), Afrofuturist feminist perspectives (Black feminist criticism informed by Black speculative thought), critical race art history and social justice or social movement studies, archival fabulation and oral histories, decentring Whiteness as decolonial framework, and any combination of the above as research or research-creation method. We also welcome analyses of other ethnic futurist projects (Indigneous, Asian, Arab, Latinx futurisms) by self-identified racialized visible minority artists who explicitly or implicitly engage with Afrofuturist ideas, aesthetics, or tropes to create otherwise worlds and Black (adjacent) futurities.
keywords: Afrofuturism, Black Lives Matter, Research-creation, Ethnic futurisms, contemporary art, critical race feminism
F.1.1 Co-creating Black Canadian Artistic Futurities
- Andrea Fatona, OCAD University
The main initiative of The Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, launched in 2021 at the Ontario College of Art & Design University, is developing an online State of Blackness platform that will serve as a repository of all visual artworks by Black Canadians from 1987 to the present day. The research program’s driving question asks, “How can new and innovative cataloging, dissemination, and pedagogical strategies be effectively used to position Black cultural production centrally within discourses of contemporary art and culture?” Through digital collections and new preservation practices, Black Canadian cultural producers’ marks and traces lost in Canadian art histories can be read by future actors to come. By virtue of excavation and discovery, the repository lends itself to creating new futures and forms of articulating and constructing Blackness. To produce these futures, we must ensure that we are in conversation with the pasts that have allowed us to be here in the present, in order to create viable spaces and expressions for the seven generations to come.
keywords: Black Canadian art, embodied archive, digital collection, Black futurities, oral histories
Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at the OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be employed by to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Fatona is a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production and the founder of the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, OCAD U.
F.1.2 Wondering Wanderers: Xenofuturism and the National Spirit
Rah Eleh, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Liminal melancholy, disidentification, expanding the geographical imagination, new language, limbo logic, and unclaimed pantheons: six prompts put forth by the betwixt artist Rah Eleh in her project Xenofuturism: A Proposal for a Liminal Futurism. The proposal was created in 2019 to conceptualize Rah’s fictional and queer character, Coco. This presentation will address the challenges of implementing these prompts and the struggle of creating a liminal topography. The artist will unpack the proposal and take the opportunity to make connections to her new video, Xenophoria. Set in the future in the year 20045, a reference to the year 2045—a milestone year feared by white nationalists in the United States as when it is anticipated the country will become a non-white majority. .Xenophoria exposes the problematic and hierarchal structure of migration interviews. The video consists of a dialogue between two characters, both performed by the artist. Canadian immigration interview questions are interspersed throughout the script to bridge reflections written by nationalists throughout history and across cultures. These are further juxtaposed by romantic promulgations of nationalism expressed in poetry and national anthems. The texts sourced from various archives and found online are recontextualized and, as a result, new meanings emerge.
keywords: ethnic futurism, liminality, nationalism, critical race feminism, performative-video
Rah Eleh is a performance, video and digital artist and a PhD candidate at die Die Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally at spaces including: Venice Biennale (Palazzo Mora), Images Festival (Toronto), Vienna Art Week, Museum London, Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), and the Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including: Chalmers Arts Fellowship, SSHRC Canada graduate and doctoral scholarships, and several Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council grants. She has been awarded many residencies including the Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the ArtSlant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris).
F.1.3 Stephanie Comilang and Simon Spieser’s Piña: Why Is the Sky Blue? Crafting Global Indigenous Futurities through Creative Technologies
- Marissa Largo, York University
- Fritz Pino, University of Regina
Mounted at the McKenzie Art Gallery in Treaty 4 lands, which has been known as Regina, Saskatchewan, Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s Piña: Why Is the Sky Blue? (2022) elegantly imagines speculative creative technologies that preserve and transmit ancestral and matriarchal knowledge of the Philippines and Ecuador. Recapitulating the connection of these two former Spanish colonies, the artist duo generates Piña: the yet-to-come AI (artificial intelligence), who is the gender-fluid embodiment of digital systems designed to archive and convey Philippine and Ecuadorian Indigenous worldviews for the future. Animating decolonial diaspora aesthetics, queer and feminist theories, and Indigenous and ethnic futurisms, the authors argue that this work crafts global Indigenous futurities by entangling temporalities, spatialities, and epistemologies through creative technologies, such as VR (virtual realities), 3D printing, video and sound. For racialized diasporic subjects in Canada, specifically Filipinos in the Prairies, these entanglements serve as critical visualities that allow for the interrogation and reflection of colonized subjectivities that have been suppressed by colonial logics and neoliberal discourses of global migration. Through the video narratives of the Babaylan (Indigenous Filipino healers), the queer performance of Piña, and the 3D renderings of ancestral knowledge as graphic data sets, these technological aesthetic expressions exceed dominant tropes of Filipinos as obedient service workers or perpetual newcomers. Thus, Piña unearths and mobilizes Indigenous knowledge grounded in relationality with land, water, non-human life, and technology. Piña allows us to experience physically and virtually a present where we can imagine emancipatory and ethical futures. The artists apply creative technologies and methodologies to encounter ancestral knowledge outside of national formations. Such knowledge may reside within the consciousness of diasporic artists and audiences. As evidenced in the community activations associated with the exhibition, Piña becomes a path for conversation about power relations within the community.
keywords: Stephanie Comilang, Simon Spieser, creative technologies, ancestral knowledge, Filipinx diaspora in Canada
Dr. Marissa Largo is an assistant professor of Creative Technologies at York University. Her work focuses on the intersections of community engagement, race, gender and Asian diasporic cultural production. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Imaginaries: Filipinx Contemporary Artists in Canada (University of Washington Press) examines the work and oral histories of artists who imagine Filipinx subjectivity beyond colonial logics. Largo was a recipient of the 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. Her 2021 curatorial project Elusive Desires: Ness Lee & Florence Yee at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant and an Ontario Arts Council Grant for Curatorial Projects: Indigenous and Culturally Diverse. Since 2018, Largo has served as the Canada Area Editor of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA).
Dr. Fritz Pino is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Regina in Saskatchewan. Her areas of research focus on the lives and experiences of historically marginalized communities, particularly those who identify as LGBTQ, racialized migrant, and older adults. She is interested in examining how they navigate the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in the margins as reflected through their bodily performances, affect and emotions, and personal desires. She engages in decolonial qualitative research approaches to bring out the cultural nuances that historically marginalized groups embody and use to resist forms of colonialisms and neoliberalisms, structural violence, and normalcy. Her work aims to create culturally-grounded interventions and approaches by centering the cultural knowledge and practices of marginalized groups and communities.
