Canadian Art

In our picks for Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver: Jordan Bennett and Zinnia Naqvi in public art; Vivek Shraya at SUM; Erika DeFreitas at Art Gallery at Evergreen; and Will Kwan at Centre A.

Editor-at-large Adrienne Huard reflects on the powerful impacts that Indigenous burlesque performers make when reclaiming their bodies and narratives through their artistic practices. In conversation with Pemmican Milkshake (Kirsten Lindquist) and Lou Lou la Duchesse de Rière (Lauren Jiles), they discuss the intersection of sexual sovereignty and visual storytelling. https://canadianart.ca//the-vibrational-effects-of-indige/

From our Frequencies issue, curator Megan MacLaurin speaks to ten artists who build worlds beyond the visiblethrough vibrotactile arts, sonic waves, pop culture and meme-making's social reverberations, and more.

Three artists have won the New Generation Photography Award, an annual prize that recognizes lens-based Canadian artists aged 35 and under. The winners are Dustin Brons of Vancouver, Chris Donovan of Saint John and Dainesha Nugent-Palache of Brampton.

Qaumajuq, the largest Inuit art museum in the world, opens later this week with an inaugural exhibition that is the most openly queer and inclusive Inuit art exhibition to date.

"The image of the working body has long been instrumentalized as an economy-driver, a nation-builder, the symbol of a collective ethos. But these images are always selective, highlighting certain labouring bodies while rendering others invisible." From our Chroma issue, Denise Ryner writes on Vancouver artist Stan Douglas and meanings of the unseen, labouring body.

"Leila Almawy’s 'Rumaan', Serene Husni’s 'Brown Bread & Apricots', Kalil Haddad’s 'The Beautiful Room is Empty' and Rana Nazzal’s 'Something from there' (all 2020) are explorations of kinship, land and the embodiment of memory. Relying on oral storytelling and family history, the films presented conversations that often felt too intimate, like I wasn’t quite supposed to be listening. Family members speak to each other, speak to their land, share their past: not quite dinner table conversations, not quite fleeting mentions of memories." The Toronto Palestine Film Festival's Local Pals Residency films recently screened at the plumb, all exploring kinship, land and the embodiment of memory. Read editorial resident Sarah Sarofim's review here.

The work I do within institutions is conditioned by a political understanding that Black struggle does not just occur on the street but in places of power. We call those places institutions, and those institutions activate modes of power that impact the conditions of Black culture and Black life. For me it is therefore crucial that the institution is understood as a site of struggle and potential transformation. Rinaldo Walcott, cultural theorist, writer and professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. From our Chroma issue, "Terrain of Struggle" features notes from six educators across CanadaDeanna Bowen, Afua Cooper, Katherine McKittrick, Charmaine A. Nelson, Dori Tunstall and Rinaldo Walcott who are making space for Black study and ethically writing Black culture into the curriculum.

On the evening of November 6, Brendan Fernandes will premiere a new digital commission for the Art Gallery of Ontarionamely, a dance piece made via Zoom. Here, Fernandes, interviewed by senior editor-at-large Yaniya Lee, talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting his creative practice, and how tools like SMS and Snapchat (as well as home-office chairs) have been applied in some of his recent dance pieces. I want to make a dance on Zoom thinking about safe space. The space of intimacy where I’m now here with you, but we’re also separate. It’s a safe space, a virtual space, that brings us together.