Worldings: A Virtual Conference
REVIEW EVENT: IMPERFECT CONSTELLATIONS
Moderator: Karen Tam | Speakers: Dr. Marissa Largo, Pamila Matharu, Moridja Kitenge Banza and Jen Sungshine and David Ng of Love Intersections | Respondent: Usha Seejarim
Adjunct curator and moderator at Griffin Art Projects, Karen Tam, will be hosting an informal conversation that brings together an intimate group of artists and cultural producers engaging with key themes of resilience and resistance from a BIPOC settler perspective. From institutional critiques to explorations into the politics of archives and the effects of colonialism on diasporic communities in Canada, this panel explores ways that art and artists address the gaps in dominant discourse and narratives by creating and sharing space for underrepresented voices to tell their stories. Panelists include Dr. Marissa Largo, Pamila Matharu, Moridja Kitenge Banza and Jen Sungshine and David Ng of Love Intersections, with South African-based artist and curator Usha Seejarim as respondent.
Indigenous Public Art: Places, Histories, and Truths
Moderator: Dr. Andrea Walsh | Speakers: Ryan Rice and Carey Newman
Works of contemporary public art by Indigenous artists in Canada are inherently tied to intentions of place making and place keeping, history/truth telling and history/truth making. Ryan Rice and Carey Newman have extensive experience in curating and creating works of public art in both the United States and Canada. This panel presentation is presented as a discussion in which we will consider nuances, challenges, and opportunities around exhibiting and creating works of public art at a time when movements such as LAND BACK, the TRC and the MMIWG Commissions stand powerfully as forces against narrow readings and the direct drawing of lines to between art and reconciliation.
The Colour Black
Moderator: Usha Seejarim | Speakers: Gcotyelwa Mashiqa, Nkgopoleng Moloi, Lawrence Lemaoana
Blackness as a colour, as an aesthetic and by reference its multifaceted identity.
Moderated by South African artist Usha Seejarim, discussions will include presentations by Gcotyelwa Mashiqa, who will share her curatorial concepts of her recently curated exhibition Black Luminosity which delves into the visual representations of Black and it’s aesthetic language and various connotations. Black Luminosity further presents us with a notion of Blackness in its multiple appearances and sensibilities. The exhibition acts as a site for learning and unlearning; acknowledging of non-western systems of knowledge and understanding, importantly to uncode and liberate representations of Blackness.
Artist and academic Lawrence Lemaoana will share examples of his artistic work that typically questions the complex relationship between media, people of South Africa, overt and subtle form of control and its impact on group psyche.
In her presentation Nkgopoleng Moloi seeks to deconstruct and analyse how colour has been employed by Black artists as a critical component of their artistic practices. She proposes that a critical study of colour is useful in understanding the ways in which Black artists have been able to navigate the art landscape and create spaces of imagination, possibility and life for themselves.
The Collapse: Creative Liberation of Collective Making
Moderated by Phala O. Phala and Bronwyn Lace of The Centre for the Less Good Idea | Speakers: Tony Bonani Miyambo, Khayelihle Dominique, Vusi Mdoyi, Bongile Lecoge-Zulu
In the process of collective making, as we follow the sigh, the whimper, the touch, the laugh, the snarl, the chuckle, the twitch, the vibration, the unclear feeling, each collaborator brings forth their own perspective, often set within their specific social, cultural and historical circumstance.
South Africa and Canada share comparable historical traumas, journeys of colonial imposition and the incomplete expedition for truth. In this panel The Centre for the Less Good Idea shares its creative processes from a selection of works exploring historical violence, erasure and omission.
The panel seeks to explore ‘collapse’, the generative disintegration of first ideas in the process of making, and the virtues of ‘collapse’ towards next ideas and peripheral perspectives. We will share and question whether in our strategies of collective making we can discover new meaning that both nurtures and fulfils our collective creative potentials.
The works sited are Commission Continua by Tony B. Miyambo and Phala O. Phala, Milk and Honey by Khayelihle Dom Gumede, Alfred Motlhapi, Billy Langa and Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Footnotes by Vusi Mdoyi, Micca Manganye, Volley Nchabeleng and Thabo Rapoo as well as the making of Breath Refrain by Bongile Lecoge-Zulu.
The Rhythm of Homing
Moderator: David Garneau | Speakers: Zab Maboungou and Diane Roberts
The Canadian imaginary tends to picture reconciliation as the restoration of good relations between settlers of European descent and First Nations, Inuit, and sometimes, Metis people. This imaginary comprehends the Nation as white and Indigenous peoples as perpetually other to it. It does not center good relations between Indigenous Nations and non-European settlers and descendants of enslaved people. Similarly, decolonization in the Canadian imaginary tends to picture possible futures in which white people remain and remain centered. This panel imagines alternative presents and futures in which conciliation is a perpetual negotiation. Where reconciliation is the restoration of good relations with the environment and all our relations. Where mixture and mobility trouble notions of purity and home as a site rather than a set of relations.
Rather than engage the colonial-centric practice of decolonization, panel participants describe their explorations of non-colonial practices, especially those indigenous to the Great Plains of Turtle Island, the Caribbean, and Africa. This panel is interested in the experience of bodies in motion, the complexity of home and homing, and extra-rational ways of knowing. We are guided by what we have learned from our bodies and the land and what Edouard Glissant calls errantry, an act of navigating and acknowledging multiplicities of cultural influences.
Bag Factory: 30 Years of Collective Imagination
Moderated by Candice Allison of BAG Factory | Speakers: Kagiso Patrick Mautloa, Thembinkosi Goniwe, Fadzai Muchemwa
The Bag Factory was founded in 1991 in the midst of a fractured political climate, shifting urban environment, and social (re)imagining. Led by David Koloane, Sandra Burnett, and Robert Loder, with the collective support of a community of visual artists, an empty hessian bag factory located in the ‘grey area’ between Newtown and Fordsburg was converted into a professional and non-hierarchical artist studio space for artists from different racial, education, and economic backgrounds. For thirty years, the organisation has supported the development of local innovation and international exchange and dialogue.
This discussion will explore the early vision and ethos of the artists who founded the Bag Factory, its resilient position in the urban context of Johannesburg, as well as an overview of current projects and initiatives.
Mide-wigwas: Birchbark Scrolls
Moderated by Daina Warren of Urban Shaman | Speakers: Jessica Jacobson-Konefall and Angelina Mcleod
For our panel we, Jessica Jacobson-Konefall (settler), Daina Warren (Cree) and Angelina Mcleod (Anishinaabe) propose to discuss a contemporary art and archival project, Mide-wigwas: Transmediating. This multimedia art exhibit by Mcleod explores how Anishinaabe peoples are reclaiming history, cultural protocols, knowledge, practices, language and ceremony. This process includes intergenerational midewewin practice, ceremonial practice through which knowledge of history, culture and language is generated and shared. Our panel explores the artworks produced, while considering histories of birchbark scrolls, artists and cultural workers as knowledge keepers, within this period of colonial suppression, maintaining their traditions with care and resilience. 70 years ago, Mcleod’s great-uncle James Redsky produced a series of midewewin birchbark scrolls, including origin, migration, and master scrolls that tell the story of the Anishinaabe migration from east to west. The migration has been documented in other sources, but these scrolls are the only known source that conveys this history through traditional Anishinaabe methods of knowledge record. Currently in possession of the Glenbow Museum, the scrolls are a source of knowledge about past, present and future, and our panel discusses their aesthetic mediation of contemporary and historical relationship through current practices of Indigenous/settler collaboration in arts and scholarship in the exhibit Mide-wigwas: Transmediating.
We acknowledge that we are gathered on ancestral lands, on Treaty One Territory. These lands are the heartland of the Métis people. We acknowledge that our water is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.
