re*
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imagining / créer / building / faire / mapping / connaissance /...
Curated by Manar Abo Touk, Lorraine Doucet Sisto and Varda Nisar
March 9 - June 1, 2023
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re* sets for itself the goal to unlearn and relearn the diverse world-making practices that continue to exist and thrive, despite the colonial attempts to eradicate them under the guise of progress.
The exhibition is conceived as a critical and collaborative reflection on the themes of worlding and world-making. We understand world-making as a positive force that creates life, cosmos, heaven and earth; a sacred act contributing to the pluriversality of modes of being; a practice that has always guarded itself against the worlding desires of colonial and patriarchal modes of being. re* offers a counterpoint to colonial histories and archives.The artworks included in the exhibition reimagine and redefine ideas around time, space, land and languages. The works of artists rudi aker, Pansee Atta, Amin Rehman, and Swapnaa Tamhane foreground different possibilities for reclaiming languages and histories, resisting and refuting imposed geographies, and reframing futures and pasts. Taking place at the Concordia University Webster Library and FOFA Gallery on unceded Kanien'kehá:ka traditional territory, re* is part of the Worlding Public Cultures 2023 Tiohtià:ke/Montreal colloquium. |
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ARTISTS
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rudi aker is a wolastoqew auntie, artist, organizer, and curator from St. Mary’s First Nation in Sitansisk (Fredericton, New Brunswick) and, for now, a guest on Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal, QC). Their artistic and research practices center relationality, placehood, and visibility, with a focus on the traversal of (un)colonized spaces through conceptions of counter-cartographies and barrier-breaking. Their ongoing research-creation project, topographies of a homeplace, explores the boundaries of cartographic practice through beaded spatial representations – hand-held topographical maps accompanied by historically and personally informed auto-writing on site-specific experiences. This work, in various iterations, has been included in Space, Place, Home (Louise-et-Reuben Cohen Art Gallery), Tactics for Staying Home in Uncertain Times (MSVU Art Gallery), HOST (third space gallery), window winnipeg, these are our monuments (Owens Art Gallery), ehpituwikuwam (Beaverbrook Art Gallery), and [espace variable | placeholder] (La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse).
For more information, visit rudiaker.com |
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Pansee Atta is an Egyptian-Canadian visual artist, curator, and researcher living and working on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabe nation in Ottawa. Using a variety of new media, her work examines themes of representation, migration, archives, and political struggle. Previous residencies include the Impressions Residency Award at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the SparkBox Studio Award, and at the Atelier of Alexandria. Previous exhibitions have taken place in collaboration with SAW Video in Ottawa, at Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse and Z Art Space in Montréal, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and other contemporary Canadian arts spaces. Her curatorial projects include UTOPIAS, a community-based performance art festival in Kingston, Ontario, and Home/Making, an exhibition at the Canada Council Art Bank. Her ongoing research and activist practice centers community-based responses to colonial projects of collection, display, study.
For more information, visit panseeatta.com |
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Amin Rehman is a multidisciplinary visual artist who has been working since the1980s. Originally fromPakistan, he studied at the historic National College of Arts and the University of Punjab in Lahore. He received a Masters from the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2011. Rehman has exhibited
extensively in a number of exhibitions across Canada, notably Other Histories at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery (2008); Hope at the Art Gallery of Regina (2014); A is for… at the McIntosh Gallery at the University of Western Ontario (2012) and White Wash at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, (2011). Rehman received the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grants to Visual Artists in 2014, 2017 and 2021. He also received the prestigious Chalmers Fellowship Award from the Ontario Arts Council twice, once in 2008 and then in 2017. He has received the grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council 11 separate times since 2008. He was honoured with SAVAC’s (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) ‘Artist of the Year Award’ in 2005. Recently, his exhibition the Bleeding Borders was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Alberta from November 25, 2021, to March 20, 2022. For more information, visit aminrehman.com |
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Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist, writer, and curator. Her visual practice is dedicated to drawing, making handmade paper, and working with the material histories of cotton and jute. Her interests extend to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, Phaidon Press (2016). Curated exhibitions include In Order to Join – the Political in a Historical Moment (2013-2015) an exhibition of global feminisms at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and CSMVS, Mumbai, India; HERE: Locating Contemporary Canadian Artists (2017), Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, and CONSTITUTIONS (2021) at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal. She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence. Her artwork and research has been supported by SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, and Ontario Arts Council. She was a Research Fellow with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009), and an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (2013-2014). In 2019, she was the Ontario juror for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently on the board of SAVAC. She has exhibited her work at articule, Montreal; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Serendipity Arts Festival, Panjim; and has held a solo exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. In 2021, she was commissioned by the V&A Dundee, Scotland, to create a body of work around jute histories, which is currently on view.
For more information, tamhane.net |