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Sediment: the archive as a fragmentary base
Louis Henderson, Bring Breath to the Death of Rocks, 2018. Super 16mm transférerez to HD video, colour, sound. English subtitles, 28 min. Courtesy of the artist
Filipa César, Spell Reel, 2017. Documentary, 96 min, colour. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, www.vdb.org
Pamila Matharu, INDEX (SOME OF ALL PARTS), 2022. Digital video, 10 min. 58 sec. Courtesy of the artist
Krista Belle Stewart, Seraphine, Seraphine, 2014. Video, B&W and colour, sound, 38 min. 57 sec. Edition 1/5. Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University Purchase, 2017 (017.08)
Sandra Brewster, Token (Medicinal Herbs), from the series Token, 2019. Archival pigment prints. Courtesy of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
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February 4th – April 1st, 2023

Sediment: The Archive as a Fragmentary Base

Sandra Brewster, Filipa César, Justine A. Chambers, Louis Henderson, Pamila Matharu, Krista Belle Stewart.

Curator : Denise Ryner

Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund

With Sediment: The Archive as a Fragmentary Base, curator Denise Ryner proposes a geologic metaphor to think about how the artists in the exhibition work with archives, the documents they contain, and the circumstances of their construction. With all the works in the exhibition time-focused in form and content, including moving image and audio and led by reflections on personal and political histories, this same geological metaphor is an invitation to you to release your sense of history from an established sequence of social and political events.

Thinking about geologic time is a way to shift your perspective on modern history and the contemporary moment. Its billion-year scale dwarfing empire and capital’s vision of progress and total global development, geologic time underlies and undoes modern history’s standardized time and universalizing goal. Dig below the surface of any contemporary nation’s border and find layer upon layer of expansive stratum testifying to entirely different worlds and events that long predate the political maneuvers above. And once framed as geologic, experiences, memories, and emotions, and the bodies that hold them take on elemental and indissoluble dimensions with a reach and endurance that surpasses the powers that try to cover them over, contain, or control them.

As you visit the exhibition keep Ryner’s geological image in mind and draw the artists’ methods and the form of their works into this planet-oriented sense of time, movement, and composition. Can you identify the primary, core components that the works are built upon? What do you sense is traveling and persisting across different time frames? When do these elements remain underground and when do they come to the surface? Like the deep, rolling layers of strata shaping the planet and recording its history, what common elements do you find connecting the works across the different archives, histories, and locations each artist investigate?

Curator

Denise Ryner

Denise Ryner is an independent curator and writer who has worked in Berlin and Vancouver. From 2017 through May 2022, she was Director/Curator of Or Gallery, Vancouver where she developed and presented a robust programming cycle of exhibitions, symposia and publications including the discursive project, Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore in collaboration with Anselm Franke, Jamie Hilder and Jordan Wilson, featured on in the series “Classroom” on the international platform Art & Education. Her current curatorial, research and writing interests include place-as-agent and transnational proximities and counterflows as a context for cultural production. Recent projects include: Sensing of the Wound: Whess Harman and Pamila Matharu (Or Gallery, Vancouver) andCeremony: Burial of An Undead World (HKW, Berlin) co-curated with Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Claire Tancons and Zairong Xiang. 

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Essay

Time Undone Through the Archive

Time Undone Through the Archive
Denise Ryner

I realized too late that the breach of the Atlantic could not be remedied by a name and that the routes travelled by strangers were as close to a mother country as I would come.

—Saidiya Hartman[1]

There are more Cape Verdeans living abroad than in the country. The film was used to tell these people that their country existed, that it was independent and that they could go back.

—Sana Na N’Hada, Berlin, November 28, 2012[2]

Diasporas and routes laid through exile create their own geographies and counterflows. The objects and documents collectively assembled and produced by communities throughout exile and migration become the basis of archives that are evidence of presence, place, and resilience rather than tools of othering and domination.

As a result, archives not only form the recorded history of a people but become counter-sites, departing from their conventional role of mapping out historical points in linear time and becoming, instead, tools of Black, African, and Indigenous futurity around which anticolonial solidarity can be built and sovereignty reclaimed.

[…]

The complete essay can be viewed on the exhibition’s page and downloaded in the Texts and Documents section. A printed version is also available at the Gallery.

 

[1] From: Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 9.

[2] Quoted in: Filipa César, Tobias Hering, and Carolina Rito, eds., Luta Ca Caba Inda: Time Place Matter Voice 1967–2017 (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017), 231.

 

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Artists

Sandra Brewster

Token Reflections, 2018
Audio, 49 min. 38 sec.

Token (Mat)
Token (Handkerchief)
Token (Oxford Dictionary 2)
Token (Medicinal Herbs)
From the series Token, 2019
Archival pigment prints

Courtesy of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto

BIO

Based in Toronto, Sandra Brewster works in drawing, video, photo-based works, and installation. Her themes focus on identity and representation, ideas of movement by depicting a gesture, specific landscapes as metaphors, and manipulating old photographs to centre the people within them and their “story” of movement from one place to another. Much of her work refers to the migration of Caribbean people from the region, suggesting identity formation that encompasses different geographies and temporalities. Recent exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022-23), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2022), Les Rencontres d’Arles (2022), Hartnett Gallery, Rochester (2022), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018–2022), Or Gallery, Vancouver (2019), Musée d’art Rouyn-Naranda (2023), and California African American Museum (2023). Her public sculpture A Place to Put Your Things was presented at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto from 2022 to 2023.

EXPLORE

Reflect on Brewster’s presentation of her interlocutors’ objects through both photographs and audio interviews. What different views on the objects do these mediums present you?

A token is a personal object kept or offered as a sign or symbol and contains more than its physical appearance first reveals. Listen to the interviews and look closely at the photographs. What feelings, memories, and histories are connected to the objects?

Important for Brewster is the movement of everyday objects belonging to fellow members of the Caribbean diaspora into a gallery context. What is the status of these everyday objects once framed by an exhibition? How do their stories compare to the other ways cultural heritage and history have been framed by white-dominant, Western institutions?

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Artist’s website: https://sandrabrewster.com

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Filipa César

Spell Reel, 2017
A film assembled by Filipa César with Anita Fernandez, Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada et al.
Germany / Portugal / Guinea-Bissau
HD video, B&W and colour, sound
English subtitles, 96 min.*

Courtesy of the artist

*Projection schedule

Tuesday to Friday: 12:30 p.m., 2:15 p.m., 4:00 p.m.
Saturday: 12:00 p.m., 1:45 p.m., 3:25 p.m.

BIO

Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the fluid borders between cinema and its reception, the politics and poetics of the moving image and archival practices. Since 2011, César has been collectively researching the militant cinema practice of the African Liberation Movement in Guinea Bissau through the production of workshops, archives, films, performance, publication and community gatherings. With cine-kins she co-founded the Mediateca Onshore in Malafo. César premiered her first feature-length essay film Spell Reel at the Berlinale, 2017. Her film Quantum Creole was
presented at the Berlinale 2020. Her screenings and exhibitions include Gasworks, London; Flaherty Seminar and MoMA, New York; Harvard Art Museum, Boston; HKW, Berlin; and GfZK, Leipzig.

EXPLORE

What role does the natural environment play in the images and commentary in Spell Reel? When do the films and nature intersect?

The recovered and restored films are examples of militant cinema. Based on what you see in the video, what makes cinema militant? Who is responsible for it? Who does it address? How is it presented and received by the audience?

How does César overlay the past and present through images? How does the past and present intersect in the public screenings in Guinea-Bissau between the attendees, filmmakers Crato, Gomes, and N’Hada, and other interlocutors?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Interviews with César on Makers and Founders https://www.makersandfounders.com/Filipa-Cesar

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Justine A. Chambers

Heirloom, 2023
Performance

BIO

Justine A. Chambers is a choreographer, dancer and teacher living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

EXPLORE

Chambers approaches the body as an archive. What forms of information do you imagine a body can record? In what ways is this information stored? And how is it sensed and recalled through dance?

Examine Chambers’ use of space and the act of transmission she’s investigating. How does she position herself and the audience in relation to the exhibition space and its surrounding architecture? From where does the audience receive her performance? From where is it executed?

Chambers is intrigued by behaviors where their origin is unclear. What constitutes a learning situation? In what ways is knowledge transmitted in informal, non-verbal ways?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Artist’s website: https://justineachambers.com

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Louis Henderson

Bring Breath to the Death of Rocks, 2018
Super 16 mm transferred to HD video, colour, sound; English subtitles, 28 min.

Courtesy of the artist

BIO

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and the ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Henderson’s films and installations have been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and are distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. His writing has been published in both print and online in books and journals. At present, Henderson is a doctoral candidate at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. His research looks into the riverscapes of the East of England and Guyana through “spiral retellings” of the works of Wilson Harris and Nigel Henderson. He lives and works in Paris and Berlin and is a member of the Sylvia Wynter Reading Group.

EXPLORE

Examine and compare the different spaces that Henderson’s researcher works in and traverses. What types of research do these spaces solicit?

In the voice over, Henderson mixes extracts from Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture’s letters, philosopher Edouard Glissant’s historical play Monsieur Toussaint (1959), and Aimé Césaire’s epic poem on anti-colonial consciousness Return to My Native Land (1939). What do fiction, drama, and poetry bring to historical research? How do they bring history into the present?

An archive implies events since past with their documents systematically stored away. How does Henderson suggest an ongoing revolution? In addition to linear historical time, can you identify other temporalities at play?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Lecture, “Animism is the only sensible version of materialism,” 27 February 2016
https://vimeo.com/158145401

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Pamila Matharu

INDEX (SOME OF ALL PARTS), 2022
Digital video, 10 min. 58 sec.

Courtesy of the artist

BIO

Pamila Matharu is a settler of Panjabi, Indian descent (Jalandhar and Bhanolangha village of Kapurthala district, pre-partition Lahore), born in Birmingham, England, and arrived in Canada in 1976, based in Tkarón:to/Toronto, Treaty 13 territory. Approaching contemporary art from the position of critical pedagogy and using an interdisciplinary and intersectional feminist lens through counter-archiving, their work culminates in a broad range of forms including installation art, social practice, and experimental media art. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Artexte (Montréal), Optica (Montréal), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON), Or Gallery (Vancouver), One Archives, USC Libraries (Los Angeles), MOCA Toronto, Art Gallery of Burlington (Burlington, ON), Durham Art Gallery (Grey Bruce, ON), Cooper Cole at ART TO (Toronto), A Space Gallery (Toronto), Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), and Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). They hold a BA in Visual Arts, and a Fine Arts B.Ed. from York University.

EXPLORE

In Index, Matharu combines found documents discarded by institutions, items bought online, ephemera collected over the years, as well as their own artworks. What are some reasons to assemble an archive of one’s own? How does it compare to an official institutional archive?

What catches your attention as the images cascade down the screen? Is there a narrative to follow, a clear historical line? What connections do you make?

In their title, Matharu plays with the idiom “the whole is greater than the sum of all parts,” replacing sum with some. What does some suggest for you? How does it shape your understanding of the scale and purpose of Matharu’s archive?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

« Communing with (Art) Ancestors: Interview with Sky Gooden and Pamila Matharu. » C Magazine 114 (Winter 2020): 15-22. https://cmagazine.com/articles/communing-with-art-ancestors

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Krista Belle Stewart

Seraphine, Seraphine, 2014
Video, B&W and colour, sound, 38 min. 57 sec.
Edition 1/5

Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University
Purchase, 2017 (017.08)

BIO

Krista Belle Stewart is a citizen of the Syilx Nation currently based in Berlin and Vienna. Stewart works primarily with video, photography, sculpture, and performance, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus (2022); Goethe Institut Seattle, WA (2021); MOCA, Toronto (2020); Nanaimo Art Gallery, BC (2019); and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019). Group exhibitions include 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Eva International, Limerick (2021); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2020); and CTM Festival, Berlin (2020). Screenings and performances have been presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022); MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Manhattan (2021); and UnionDocs, Brooklyn (2019). She is an MFA graduate from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, and is presently a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.

EXPLORE

In her video Stewart draws from two state-authored sources that concern her mother Seraphine Stewart, one by a national broadcasting corporation, the other resulting from a national inquiry. What forms of memory do these sources represent? What historical perspectives and experiences do they frame?

Reflect on your role as a viewer presented with both sources side-by-side. What is left up to you to watch, listen, and grow aware of between the documentary and recorded testimony?

Seraphine Stewart answers or reacts to questioned in both the docudrama and the Commission testimony. What are the questions’ aims and how are they answered? What is left unsaid and when is silence employed?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Krista Belle Stewart in conversation with Dory Nason, 2015 https://vimeo.com/119578977

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Bibliography

List

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.

Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Césaire, Aimé. Return to My Native Land. Translated by Anna Bostock and John Berger. New York: Archipelago Books, 2014.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Unpayable Debt. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022.

Glissant, Édouard. “For Opacity.” In Poetics of Relation, 180-194. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Green, Renée. “Archives, Documents? Forms of Creation, Activism, and Use” and “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae.” In Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, 176-190, 271-288. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory, 24, no. 3 (1985): 247-272.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

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