G.4 Individual vs. Collective Work: What Can Artists Learn from Social Movement Organizing?
Sat Oct 21 / 13:45 – 15:15 / KC 203
chair /
- Sheena Hoszko, Queen’s University
This panel brings together artists working within professional art systems in so-called Canada and simultaneously participating in social movement building. Speakers will elaborate on the tensions between individual-focused art practices and the power of collective mobilizing for economic, racial, gender, disability, and environmental justice. Artists will discuss key political struggles, texts, and practical grassroots methods that inform their ongoing community-based work. In looking at the wins and challenges faced by anti-capitalist and anti-colonial groups, the panel will interrogate the question, "What can artists learn from social movement organizing?"
keywords: anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, social movements
type of session: panel
Sheena Hoszko lives and works in Montréal and is currently a Ph.D. student in the Cultural Studies program at Queen's University. Her research traces artmaking in prison as it relates to prisoner resistance and carceral expansion in Canada. Hoszko holds a BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Concordia University, and has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Musée d'art contemporain and Fondation Phi Montréal, A Space and Blackwood in Toronto, Queen's Museum, and La Ferme du Buisson in Paris. Her writing has appeared in M.I.C.E Magazine and Free Inside: The Life and Work of Peter Collins. Hoszko is a longtime anti-prison organizer and works in abolitionist collectives in Montréal and Kingston.
Design Against Design
- Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, Concordia University
This presentation argues for the urgent necessity of critical engagement and political resistance through graphic practice. It draws on Kevin Yuen Kit Lo's experience as Founder and Principal of LOKI, a small Montreal-based graphic design studio committed to working with social movements toward radical political change. Lo will reflect on over fifteen years of community-based design work in parallel with long-term anarchist organizing. Design Against Design unravels the real-world relationships, motivations and contradictions in a socially engaged design practice.
keywords: activism, anarchism, graphic design
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo is Assistant Professor of Communication Design and Visual Culture in the Department of Design and Computation Arts. He works at the intersections of graphic design, cultural production, and social change with a research focus on publication practices and social movements. His research is invested in exploring the tensions between material and relational studies of design as a means of fostering greater social and political autonomy.
Kevin founded the graphic design studio LOKI in 2014, working alongside community organizations, non-profits, cultural and educational institutions, unions, artists, researchers and activist groups, as part of broader movements for social change. The studio has worked on campaigns to stop racial profiling, created protest graphics for anti-racist and anti-colonial social justice movements, designed advocacy material for sex workers rights, created online platforms for critical journalism and supported the cultural production of marginalized writers and artists through the design of publications, exhibitions, and collaborative works.
Kevin holds an MA in Typographic Design from the London College of Printing (UAL). Prior to founding LOKI, he worked in interactive design, advertising and fashion. He is a member of the Memefest network and the Justseeds artist co-operative. Kevin is the author of Design Against Design: Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice (2023) with Set Margins’ Press.
Union Organizing within a Quebec University Context
- Liz Xu, Concordia University
This paper draws on my experiences of labour organizing in a university context, specifically focusing on the power dynamics between technical staff, administrators, and professors.
keywords: collective, labour, solidarity, unions, university
Liz Xu is a designer, educator, and artist, specializing in the technical support and fabrication of wood-based artistic projects within arts communities. She holds a BFA in Print Media from Concordia University and a DEP in Cabinetmaking from Rosemount Technology Centre. Xu is passionate about using her skills to facilitate the visions of artists, and using skill-sharing as an empowerment technique for people new to the often male-dominated woodworking field.
Xu uses traditional woodworking techniques to produce hand-crafted design objects and sculptures. Her work considers the history and labour of the woodworking trade, specifically focusing on materiality in relation to modern day capitalism.
Resisting Separate Spheres: Developing Embedded Relationships in Art and Political Organizing Practices
- M. Gnanasihamany & HK Jackson, Independent, Concordia University
Participation in the ecology of art is intractable from the dominant capitalist system which elevates the singular individual over all forms of collectivity. In order to address this contradiction, artists with a commitment to liberatory politics may take one of two tacts: either embracing a liberal ideology wherein all creative work is inherently radical, denying unavoidable complicities, or centring social issues in the subject of the art itself through pedagogic projects, confessional practices, and therapeutic or participatory methodologies. Counter to their aims of inducing collectivity through education or shared vulnerability, these practices tend to reinforce the delineation of the artist as individual experts, separated from the collective.
Building on the abolitionist and anti-violence frameworks of Jackie Wang, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nimmi Gowrinathan, and Nancy Princenthal, we argue that the most effective bridge between collective organizing and artistic practice lies not in aesthetic convention or specific subject matter, but in the relationships we surround ourselves with and those we form across history through social movement research and participation. In understanding how communities are strengthened and expanded by feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-carceral organizing, we gain a roadmap for an effective and politically active artistic community. As partners and collaborators, we are participants in each other’s political as well as personal lives. In refusing the boundaries between spheres of relation-making—arts, organizing, study, friendship, love—, we can create artworks that draw from and contribute to the goals of social organizing for bodily sovereignty, disability justice, and collective liberation.
keywords: anti-violence, collectivity, prison abolition, relational aesthetics, solidarity
M Gnanasihamany and HK Jackson are creative collaborators in Tio’tia:ke with a shared practice exploring sex, desire, and collectivity in art historical and political contexts. HK Jackson completed her BFA in contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University (2017). Braiding together research, art making, and political organizing, her work in critical arts writing and performance art draws on her years of support and advocacy work with survivors of sexual violence. M Gnanasihamany holds a BFA in painting from the University of Alberta (2015). Their work in painting, poetry, and curation examines the political world of pictures through their dissemination, collection, and reproduction, with their most recent projects supported by Metatron Press, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, and Hollyhock Centre. Jackson and Gnanasihamany’s collaborative work can be found in Leste Magazine and will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the VAV gallery, Concordia.
Waard Ward floral workshop, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, 2021. Environment by Nicolas Fleming. Photos by Darren Rigo.
Waard Ward floral workshop, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, 2021. Environment by Nicolas Fleming. Photos by Darren Rigo.
Waard Ward floral workshop, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, 2021. Environment by Nicolas Fleming. Photos by Darren Rigo.
Radical Friendship with Newcomers through Social Practice & Mutual Aid
- Hanen Nanaa, Petrina Ng, Patricia Ritacca, Waard Ward
Many contemporary art community projects are short-term and project-based, unlike the long-term and relationship-based models of existing migrant justice networks across the country. In this presentation, Waard Ward examines the role of resource redistribution and mutual aid for newcomers via the contrasting channels of art-based funding and informal community networks. By discussing their ongoing collaborative work of floristry and gardening, Waard Ward shares practical and theoretical ideas around the role of art, citizenship, and care in an era of increasing border restrictions.
keywords: collectivity, migrant rights, mutual aid, social practice, labour
Waard Ward collective was formed in 2019 to support a Syrian refugee family’s settlement in Toronto. We are a contemporary art collective that creates floral arrangements, builds community gardens, supports mutual aid networks, and invites newcomers to train as florists and imagine social-entrepreneurial futures.
Collectively led by Syrian florist Abd Al-Mounim, community organizers/Syrian newcomers Hanen Nanaa and Shoruk Alsakni, educator Laura Ritacca, curator/educator Patricia Ritacca, and artist Petrina Ng, Waard Ward collaborates in floristry, decolonial research, and newcomer support. Waard Ward's name proposes the idea of a diasporic flower district; "waard" is a romanization of the Arabic word for flower.
