Inviting the public into dialogue with artists, theorists, researchers, critics, educators, and cultural workers, the Gallery’s events position exhibition making as a lens through which to examine today’s issues and debates. Recognizing the public’s sense for inquiry and experimentation, these workshops, lectures, screenings, tours and other interventions ask us to reflect critically upon the ways we look and the forces inflecting our experience. Welcoming and supporting different modes of public participation, the Gallery’s programming aims to make and hold space for new vectors of interpretation and inclusion.
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Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund
ARCHIVE AS RESISTANCE
Talk by Désirée Rochat, followed by a conversation with Deanna Bowen
Wednesday, April 3, 5:30 PM
In English
Free, at the Gallery
In response to The Golden Square Mile, community educator and scholar Désirée Rochat discusses Deanna Bowen’s use of community and institutional archives to narrate histories of Black resistance and resilience to settler colonialism and imperialism. Rochat analyses Bowen’s practice as a form of Black memory work, which ties together the retrieval, activation and transmission of tangible and intangible archives related to the lives of Black communities. The talk is followed by a conversation with the artist.
Désirée Rochat is a community educator and transdisciplinary scholar. She holds a PhD in Educational Studies from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Guided by an integrative approach connecting historical research, community archival preservation and education, her work aims to document, preserve, theorize and transmit (hi)stories of Black communities’ activism. Interested in the educational potential of stories and histories of community organizing, she has produced popular education material on the history of Caribbean communities in Quebec and is involved in various initiatives for the preservation and promotion of Black community archives. She was the Concordia University Library’s Researcher-in-residence for 2021-2022 and is now a postdoctoral fellow with COHDS and the Department of History at Concordia University.
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Panel discussion and book launch of Arctic Prisms: Contemporary Arts from Across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi
With Amy Prouty, Charissa von Harringa, and Taqralik Partridge, moderated by Heather Igloliorte
Followed by a reception.
Wednesday, March 27, 5:30 PM
Panel in English followed by a Q&A in English, French and Inuktitut
Free, at the Gallery
The event features curators, scholars and artists whose practices focus on circumpolar arts, and celebrates the late 2023 publication of Arctic Prisms: Contemporary Arts from Across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi. The panel discussion will focus on three key facets of Indigenous life, resurgence and activism, and consider the critical role the arts can play in supporting Indigenous rights to language, land and sovereignty. The idea for the book emerged from the Sámi and Inuit contemporary art exhibition Among All These Tundras, which was produced by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in 2018 and circulated by the Gallery in Canada and New Zealand. Published in the languages of the various contributing communities, namely Inuktitut, Iñupiat, Kalaallisut (Groenland), North Sámi, as well as English and French, it aims to generate new connections and knowledges across geographic and linguistic divides.
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