H.1 Slow curation and relational care in public art, Part 2
Fri Oct 28 / 15:30 – 17:00 / Great Hall, rm 1022, Hart House
chairs /
- Kristine Germann, McMaster University
- Stephanie Springgay, McMaster University
Curating in public space necessitates a set of responsibilities for curatorial care. What possibilities are offered to places, participants, artists, and artworks when the curator is not the authority but alternately inhabits the position of carer and centers slow curation? Slow curation, according to scholar Johnson is a method that is context specific, relational, and collaborative, and is accountable to diverse communities (Johnson 26). Slow curation unsettles care and emphasizes an ethics of responsibility and accountability grounded in radical relatedness. This requires, as Puig de la Bellacasa writes, thinking of care beyond nature/culture binaries and settler colonial and anthropocentric morals (Puig de la Bellacasa 13).
We invite conference papers and presentation proposals that explore slow curation as relational care including, but not limited to: Indigenous practices; decolonizing and anti-oppressive methodologies; place and ecological crisis; trauma and healing; time, duration, and the ephemeral; social practice and the shifting roles of audience, participant, and co-collaborator; questions about publicness.
Johnston, Megan Arney. “Slow Curating: Re-thinking and Extending Socially Engaged Art in the Context of Northern Ireland.” On Curating-After the turn: Art education beyond the museum, no 24, 2014, pp 23-33.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care, Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press. 2017.
keywords: public art, curating, social practice
H.1.1 What Water Knows: Reflections on Curating the 2019 and 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art
- Katie Lawson, Western University
What Water Knows: Reflections on Curating the 2019 and 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art draws on a chapter authored for the recent major exhibition publication Water, Kinship, Belief. It takes up questions of curatorial methodology, analogous lessons from hydrology, and sustained engagement within an expansive network of collaborators. I worked alongside co-curators Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien on The Shoreline Dilemma and What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, the three of us aligned in our approach of curating as a process of attunement, and a process that is context-specific, relational, and collaborative.
The Toronto Biennial of Art offered the rare opportunity for the same curatorial team to work together across both the first and second editions of the Biennial. This fostered a sustained engagement between curators with the city and its perpetually transforming communities and with the artists themselves. In the realm of Biennial and mega-exhibition making practices, it facilitated multi-year commissioning processes, supporting more iterative forms of production and allowing for reflection and re-evaluation in between the two Biennials.
Given that Toronto Biennial focuses on supporting new commissions, I understood my role as a part of the curatorial team to question the material impacts of artwork production, and to encourage practices of salvaging, material recycling and redistribution of matter in a city that is constantly in a state of flux and (re)development. It is not just the materials that go into artistic production that allow for thinking through the footprint of exhibition making, but also the spaces that are taken up as sites. The strategy of taking up vacated spaces is one of many when thinking expansively about how to work in and with the specificity of a place. How can the dispersed presence of a free, city-wide Biennial, allow varying publics to see this place in all of its complexities, to become curious, to question epistemological paradigms that have brought us to present day?
keywords: biennial, sustainability, public art, curatorial
Katie Lawson was most recently Curator for the Toronto Biennial of Art, working with Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien on the inaugural 2019 and 2021 editions. She is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies Curatorial program at the University of Toronto, where she previously completed her Master of Arts in Art History. She is currently a PhD student at Western University.
She has held curatorial and programming positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, bodega (NYC) and the University of Toronto. She has lectured and participated in programming with Images Festival, The Gladstone Hotel, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Laboratory for Aesthetics + Ecology and Universities both nationally and internationally.
She has guest curated exhibitions at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Y+ Contemporary, Scarborough; RYMD, Reykjavik; the Art Museum, Toronto; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
H.1.2 Island Neighbours and Nations: Breathing together across the shared ocean through slow curation
Toby Lawrence, Open Space
Throughout 2023, Open Space (Victoria, BC) will present a series of public art and in-gallery installations, residencies and events under the title Wayfinders: the ones we breathe with. Breathing together across the shared ocean—in cultural, environmental, and molecular exchange—Wayfinders recalls ancient way finding practices utilizing the stars, wind, water, and land markers to find paths across the sea and into the intertwined histories, practices, and contemporary lives of adjacent homelands, through the work of artists from island neighbours and nations across the Pacific Ocean. Three successive artist projects by Camille Georgeson-Usher (Galiano Island), Tanya Lukin Linklater (Kodiak Island), and L.uli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa) anchor the series, each one coincidently the culmination of long-term ideas awaiting the right time and place. Stretched across a timeframe typically filled by three separate exhibitions, this elongated program simultaneously nurtures the relationships that led to the development of this series and leaves space for the Open Space programming committee to organically and intuitively build outward with interdisciplinary programming, looking locally to communities on Vancouver Island and across to Haida Gwaii and Hawai'i. Herein, Wayfinders reveals itself as slow curation. This intentional move focused through the framework of island neighbours and nations recognizes the depth and transfer of knowledge as activated through relationality—essential in breaking open western colonial strongholds within the discipline of curation, de-centring singular narratives within curation, and implementing responsibility beyond personal subjectivity and worldview. Such relationality further extends to the land, the cosmos, and ideas, while underscoring accountability and the dynamism by which learning takes place (Wilson 2008). As the curatorial lead for Wayfinders, I am tracing transoceanic throughlines made visible by way of conversations, connections, and deep listening. This paper will explore these interwoven threads and modes of practice.
keywords: islands, transoceanic, relationality, curation, interdisciplinarity, Indigeneity
Dr. Toby Lawrence is a settler-Canadian curator of mixed European ancestry and the daughter and granddaughter of fibre artists. Her work centres collaborative and relational approaches grounded in anti-racist, decolonial, and intersectional feminist methodologies. She has held curatorial positions throughout BC and was a contributing curator of the inaugural Contingencies of Care Residency hosted by OCAD University, Toronto Biennial of Art, and BUSH Gallery and a curatorial resident at the Otis College of Art and Design Emerging Curators Retreat in Los Angeles. Recent publications include “Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation,” co-authored with Michelle Jacques for PUBLIC 64, and forthcoming book chapters for Creative Conciliations: Reflections, Responses, and Refusals (eds. Tarah Hogue, Jonathan Dewar, and Jennifer Robinson), Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing (eds. Dana Claxton & ezra winton), and Curatorial Contestations: Critical Methods in Contemporary Exhibition-Making in Canada (eds. Michelle Jacques and Ellyn Walker). She is a Curator at Open Space in Lekwungen Territory.
H.1.3 To Know Water
- Maria Hupfield, University of Toronto Mississauga
The projects I curate operate artist to artist and center on relationships respectfully alongside other Indigenous makers and thinkers navigating the USA/Canada colonial border. By focusing on relations and Indigenous kinship ties these projects work to strengthen connections directly, ethically and with accountability. For the proposed panel on curatorial care my contribution will be a performative presentation titled To Know Water in which I will highlight a selection of my curatorial projects leading up to my most recent project focused on the waterways in Toronto as the inaugural artist in residence with ArtworxTO and the City of Toronto. During this presentation I will share my various approaches for each exhibition as I navigated diverse protocols and how one lead to the next functioning as continuum and network of support grounded in trust. Relevant online content, book projects, and exhibitions catalogs for each will also be shared including the development of decolonial bio strategies for the artist to increase transparency and new language across diverse practices by Indigenous Makers. I will also share strategies on how I navigated protocols across institution, nation and community.
Exhibitions to be discussed include: #callresponse (touring exhibition) 2017, grunt gallery; Night on Neebahgeezis, Nuit Blanche City of Toronto 2017; The First Water is the Body, Art Center of New Jersey 2021; Coffee Break, Vera List Center for Arts and Politics 2021-22; and my current research with the Indigenous Virtual Living Archive, Indigenous Creation Studio UTM.
For this presentation performative actions linked to each project will be utilized to provide an engaging and lively exchange with the audience.
keywords: Indigenous, performance art, collaboration, all our relations, kinship, decolonial, mino bimaadiziwin, anishinaabek, language, anishinaabemowin
Maria Hupfield is the City of Toronto Inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residence (AiR) Program (2022), and a Mellon Distinguished Fellow, Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University. Hupfield was awarded the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada 2018. Her work is in various collections including the National Gallery of Canada, and Art Gallery of Ontario. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan and is a member of the Anishinaabek People belonging to Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario. She is an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Performance and Media Art, Department of Visual Studies / English and Drama, and a Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), where she runs the Indigenous Creation Studio. Hupfield developed courses in All Our Relations: Land, Art, and Activism; Anishinaabe Storytelling; and Topics in Indigenous Performance.
H.1.4 Spending Time in the Archives: Artist Residencies in the Archive/Counter-Archive Project
- Janine Marchessault, York University
Archive/Counter-Archive is a research-creation partnership involving over twenty archival organizations and cultural repositories for AV and other artist media in Canada. This project focuses on the challenges and generative opportunities afforded by diverse media archives belonging to Indigenous communities (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities, People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. Through artist residencies and creative counterarchives, we are calling attention to archival media most vulnerable to decay, disappearance and inaccessibility. This talk will focus in particular on artists engagements with decay, putrefaction and the regeneration of archival materials through performative forms of living entanglement.
New ecological approaches to artistic production and curation ask us to see relationships between nature and culture in terms of a broader continuum of entanglements (rather than discrete temporalities and objects) which work to redefine history. My talk will engage with several recent site-specific exhibitions, artist residencies and creative methodologies tied to “process cinema” that helps reimagine sustainable cultures through the creation of dynamic encounters and slow-moving analogue media.
keywords: process cinema, public art, entanglement, located history
Janine Marchessault is Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research engages with the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR). She belongs to the CinemaExpo67.ca research group. Her latest project is an expanded cinema project, Outer Worlds—commissioning five IMAX films by artists, which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 and will begin touring soon. She is the Director of Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage (2018 – 2024), a research collaboration involving more than 20 community and artist run archives devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, Black, LGBTQ2+, immigrant, and women’s communities. Her most recent monograph is Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Ecologies, Utopias (MIT 2017) and co-edited collections include Process Cinema: Handmade film in the Digital Age (MQUP 2019) and Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures (Public Books, 2022).
