Xpace Cultural Centre
2-303 Lansdowne Avenue Unit 2, Main Floor. M6K 2W5 Toronto, ON, Canada

JOB POSTING ALERT OCAD students, we’re hiring a Programming Assistant! Deadline: Feb 1st, 2021 @ 11:59 PM... The Programming Assistant will work in collaboration with the Xpace Director and Programming Coordinators to plan, develop and execute Xpace’s exhibitions, workshops and event programming in Winter/Spring 2021. This position is a part-time 3-month contract, from Feb 8th - May 7th, 2021. Compensation is $16.15/hour at 18 hours per week, with the exact days TBD upon hiring. Click here for the full job description, requirements and COVID-19 notes: http://www.xpace.info/current-job-postings/ If you have any questions, accessibility and/or accommodation requests, please feel free to email Alexia at any time at mailto:[email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you! Stay safe <3 See more

Melina Mehr @streetfog wrote an amazing essay to accompany our current Window Space installation, Belonging to Eachother: an exhibition by Misbah Ahmed @misb_h up in our Window Space in partnership with @designtofestival! Also please browse through all of our essays by emerging writers that accompany each exhibition. Please visit www.xpace.info to read. We are always looking for writers & have an ongoing open call for emerging writers! If you’re interested in writing for us please send topics of interest and 1-3 writing samples to [email protected] and we will add you to our ongoing list of writers, when we find an exhibition that suits the themes in your work we will reach out to you to work in collaboration with an artist. All opportunities are always paid!

EXTERNAL SPACE HANBOK/ Enna Kim Essay by Lucy Fang November 20 December 19, 2020... How do you describe in-between-ness? Between any two or more items, there is an in-between: a boundary separating a person and another, or more abstract divides such as generations, languages, identities, or spaces. Rather than naming a specific location or object, the in-between is instead the gap whose defining requires the things around it. Set over a steady rhythm featuring traditional Korean instruments, HANBOK/ - a video work by Enna Kim - straddles digital animation, textile, dance and projection installation to place and disrupt this transient space. " -From the essay by Lucy Fang Documentation by Polina Teif

PROJECT SPACE mâsikîskâpoy Megan Feheley, Essay by Kayla Carter November 20th January 9th, 2020... "Tobacco has been frozen inside of ice that is connected to a chain that is suspended from the ceiling. Beneath the ice, we see a large square of cedar that has been meticulously placed on the ground. When all of these things are put in conversation with one another, you are presented with mâsikîskâpoy by Meg Feheley. Something very apparent about this piece is the precise way it exists in the space. Yes, of course all pieces that are part of an exhibition tend to require tireless work and razor-sharp precision. However, the precision that I am speaking of is one that cannot simply take place when an artist decides. What I am speaking of is the precision that is revealed when an artwork has been given the space to exist in its own right. More importantly, to honestly exist in its own right, outside of settler-colonial ideas of time, and space." -From the essay Kayla Carter Documentation by Polina Teif

MAIN SPACE behind the curtain cultivated by Morgan Sears-Williams November 20 January 9th 2020 Maddie Alexander, Dana Buzzee, Faith Alexandra Marie, Adrienne Huard, Wren Tian-Morris, and B.G-Osborne... Publication design by Lina Wu Essay by Morgan Sears-Williams "In November 2019, I was en route to Calgary to install Femme4Femme, a collaborative exhibition with Maddie Alexander, in a local downtown library. We were excited to have our work publicly accessible in a conservative city and were thinking of the young queer and trans folks who would be able to view our work. We hoped that young queer and trans folks would be able to see themselves through our work, and to be able to offer a space where they would feel validated, supported and acknowledged. During the installation, in a short conversation with a senior library staff member, I was told that in order to continue with the exhibition we would be asked to remove parts of the show in particular, the parts that referenced safer sex practices between queer people. While explaining that the exhibition came as a whole and that they had access to all the materials months beforehand we stated that we were unwilling to compromise our artistic integrity by removing parts of our exhibition. This conversation ended with us pulling the exhibition from the library and finding another venue. behind the curtain is an exhibition that seeks to create an exchange about these experiences that happen often within institutional spaces, where works that are deemed obscene are pushed behind a curtain or removed altogether rather than allowing a potentially difficult dialogue to occur. The artists in this exhibition interrogate their own feelings regarding censorship from organizations or institutions, while also unpacking instances of their own self censorship." -From the essay by Morgan Sears-Williams

WINDOW SPACE To Save / To Make Jasmine Cardenas Essay by Alexia Bréard-Anderson November 20 January 9th, 2020... "Covered in a protective, bright-red fuzz, the achiote fruit ripens slowly with the sun; falling off the tree once fully mature and splitting open to expose the numerous seeds within. After being soaked in water or warmed in oil, the pulp surrounding the seeds can be mixed into a paste for a vibrant yellow-orange dye - which Cardenas uses as a natural pigment and the material foundation of her multimedia installation To Save/To Make. Both literally and figuratively, the achiote acts as glue, bridging lived experiences and honouring the artist’s memories as she works through the anxieties of carrying and reckoning with a dual identity in a settler colonial society. Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks. Because the pigment is quick to dry, Cardenas moves swiftly - yet with intention. As the floors and walls become her canvas, intuitive brushstrokes evoke traces of brujería and stories of superstition within her family. The street-facing window, once blank, is now transformed as the artist summons a sweeping, a clearing of energies, a protection against mal de ojo. Achiote for passion, for clarity, for courage. " - from the essay by Alexia Bréard-Anderson Documentation by Polina Tief

It is with love and rage that we have written a public statement and letter addressed to John Tory, Ana Bailao, #MaryAnneBedard and #JanieRomoff to support the demands to immediately halt the encampment evictions, move to repeal the by-laws that make it illegal to camp and focus their time, energy and funds to providing encampment residents with adequate fire safety, survival gear and permanent, affordable housing. Thank you to South Asian Visual Arts Centre for urging Xpace... and other art organizations in the city to join this demand and to Encampment Support Network (ESN) for your ongoing labour and dedication. #NoEncampmentEvictions Read the full letter here: http://www.xpace.info//Xpace-Public-Statement-Against-Enca

Our monthly newsletter got a fresh new design by Paz Pereira Vega! If you prefer to receive our news + updates directly to your inbox, click here to read + subscribe

EXTERNAL SPACE Abra Hiba Ali Essay by Sajdeep Soomal October 9 November 7, 2020... I examine the expansive role of Amazon in the industries of AI, web store and cloud service. The myth that technology is supposed to make the world a better place is contradicted by the rise of behemoth corporations, such as Amazon. Black and brown people are made hyper-visible subjects via Amazon’s AI-webcam doorbell Ring, facial recognition software and paranoid neighborhood watch app. Due to gross negligence, and abusive work conditions, Amazon extracts labor from their workers until they are injured or die. The abusive policies of Amazon are replicated by their partnerships with arming the police, military and ICE that harm the lives of their factory and delivery workers, predominantly people of color. Anti-Blackness, agoraphobia, racism, sexism and homophobia are founded and maintained in our material realities and encoded into technological systems’ structural biases. My research as a performance, video artist and scholar examines the connection between local and international modes of incarceration and deportation.

WINDOW SPACE Façade through the Façade Leila Fatemi Essay by Mitra Fakhrashrafi October 9 November 7, 2020... Façade through the Façade is a site-specific installation that expands on Fatemi’s recent project, Disorienting Orientalism. Used as a barrier, the mashrabiya frames the viewer’s access to the collection of Orientalist fantasy paintings assembled behind the window. An architectural feature traditionally found in Islamic regions, the mashrabiya is an oriel window that provides air circulation while doubling as a privacy screen indoors. Informally translated as Harem Window, it is a common symbol within Orientalist travel literature, paintings and photography depictions of the Harem. Merging Orientalist harem fictions with Islamic architecture, the work creates a voyeuristic environment where the viewer is invited to challenge their reading of the scenes behind the screen Documentation by Roya DelSol and Philip Leonard Ocampo

PROJECT SPACE Yd Kw Laura Grier Essay by Emma Steen October 9 November 7, 2020... One day, while graining in the studio, I found myself wanting to talk with stone (Kw) and tell them all about my experiences in love, heartache, sexuality, depression, of my tireless pursuit to research my inherent Dene spirituality and teachings. Finally, Kw just said, show me. So, by using unique, situational, and performative ways to create marks on Kw, I physically show them what it might feel like to be human, what it feels like to feel bad, to feel good, and everything in between. Yd (Spiritual Being) Kw (Stone) is a collaborative series of stone lithography prints, performances, and conversations between Kw and me. This work shows my relationship to Kw as we work with ideas of reciprocity, ceremony, and realities of urban Indigeneity. Documentation by Roya DelSol

We’ve extended the deadline to apply to form part of the Xpace team as a part-time Digital Media Coordinator New deadline is Monday, October 27th @ 11:59 PM! Click here to read through the full job description + requirements: https://bit.ly/3nMeHGV If you have any questions or need support throughout the application process please email [email protected].

Quartet with Net Interface and Mimic, Lake Ontario Performed by Camille Rojas and Lauren Runions Edited by Camille Rojas Curated by Dallas Fellini... As a part of the exhibition the body as a fever dream, Camille Rojas and Lauren Runions enact an improvisational dance performance, inhabiting the gallery space and participating with works Net Interface by Eija Loponen-Stephenson and Mimic, Lake Ontario by Sheri Osden Nault. With no one present to bear witness to their performance, their actions are instead memorialized through the traces their bodies leave in the space. ... Consume this performance from your work-from-home laptop, surfing between tabs for online shopping, public health stats, tabs for grant applications and mutual aid. Consume this performance distractedly as it is the only way we can engage anything right now. Consume this performance while committing time theft. Consume this performance in the middle of the night. Consume this performance on a statutory holiday. Consume this performance while thinking of a lover, watch arms pour into gloves and hands cleave to body parts in a way that feels foreign. Memorialize bodily closeness.

A special 15-minute video by Renelyn Quinicot guiding us through a playful movement practice and breathwork techniques for concentration and calm. www.instagram.com/renelynquin

New Ways to Describe Old Things by Florence Yee September 8th October 2nd, 2020 This window exhibition takes into account its site as a storefront, the most accessible place of the gallery, and the one most similar to benign commercial spaces. A scrolling LED monitor sits above a large decorative knot. It has historically been used for recording events and places by the complexity, pattern, and colour of the knots. Although it is still present in spaces as mass-produc...ed decoration, my practice questions what it means to bring knot-making skills back to diasporic youth as an intentional craft. As the knots are often seen as tacky or outdated, how can the agency of choosing the knots’ form change their significance? For example, the knots are usually accompanied by the words or , characters for happiness and fortune that are rooted in heteronormative and capitalist ideas of marriage and financial success. I am interested in new terms for gender non-conformity in the written Cantonese language, like the combination of the radical(water) and the character (person) to mean gender fluid. Stemming from a curiosity of traditional Chinese knot-making, the project took a turn into self-reflexive questions of cultural authority, the barriers to intergenerational learning in the diaspora (especially during a pandemic), and the pressure to create the most accurate and certain representation of tradition to an audience that is used to a kitschy ethnic exotica. The LED signage functions both as an externalization of these discussions, and false form of advertising in the neighbourhood. The residency project has been a process of removing and reinstating layers of legibility that are still in negotiation for me. -From the Exhibition essay by Marsya Maharani Documentation by Roya DelSol See more

Your Hands and Eyes Keep Us Alive Cleopatria Peterson in collaboration with Clara Lynas, Kaya Joan, and Forest Van Winkle "Your Hands and Eyes Keep Us Alive is a love letter: from me to you, to my friends, to the zines, and to the stories we tell. A zine is a self-published print publication, they can take a variety of forms, be it the paper, the genre, or medium. The best part about a zine is that everyone can make them.... I may be the curator in residence, but collaborator might be a better title. The work that was created for the exhibition would not have been possible without my collaborators: Clara Lynas, Kaya Joan and Forest Van Winkle. This also includes the people who had made the work before me with the zines archived in the library. In responding to the publications in Xpace’s Zine Library, I sifted through their history and grabbed what spoke to me one way or another. I read, I learned, I experienced. Then, I wrote it all down. I didn’t know how else to respond to the work, writing is the only comfort I’ve found in the pandemic, and it was through this I began to have a conversation with the work, but also myself. I could get into my fragmented identity, the ones that make my presence in a gallery even more important, but let’s just accept that I have and will continue to be denied space as long as I live. The pandemic rushed in and everything I had spent a year working towards left with it. This is out of anyone’s control, but through something like this, you learn that an institution is not your friend; it will always put capital over your wellbeing, especially if you are on the margins." -From the exhibition essay by Cleopatria Peterson Documentation by Roya DelSol See more

Hands that gather and forget by Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz & Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti September 8th October 2nd, 2020 "Every December, Ana Luisa Bernardez Notz and Sebastian Rodriguez y Vasti return to Venezuela, where they are both from, to visit their families. On these trips, they take photographs; two separate individuals, two different families, one same country and one similar practice. These trips are overrun with emotion: of home, loss, comfort, fear. Es como u...na anticipacion, an anticipation, that the minute they land, something will be taken away. Photographs reconcile this loss and offer a way of addressing it. Due to the pandemic, the artists tell me they anticipate they will not be returning this coming December; and again, like the anticipation of leaving, the future holds an emptiness. Yet, in this moment of the pandemic, some of us have been gifted time. What questions have we finally asked, and answered, with this time? What can be created with the space made available by this collapse? Bernardez and Rodriguez have disinterred their archives for their exhibition, Hands that gather and forget, in the Project Space." -From the exhibition essay by Maria Isabel Martinez All documentation by Roya DelSol See more

Your Hands and Eyes Keep Us Alive Cleopatria Peterson in collaboration with Clara Lynas, Kaya Joan, and Forest Van Winkle September 8th October 2nd, 2020...Continue reading

September 4th - October 2nd, 2020 "When was the last time you held someone’s hand? Did you enjoy it? What if it helps you to relieve your lingering anxiousness from an unforeseen future? Certainty plays a considerable role in our lives; it guides us to make decisions and provides alternatives in various situations. Vice Versa, uncertainty can create many negative mental responses within us. The unpredictability of time, space and people has the power to fabricate fear and anx...iety, and it can grow like a disease. We are often taught to fight against the fear of uncertainty or even to ignore it, Proposition 1: Hands by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang suggests something different. A black & white single-channel video installation indicates a series of hand positions involving two participants in which the artist has transformed a child game from South Korea into a therapeutic process for healing. As part of Kang’s long-term research project, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang’s Proposition 1: Hands takes on the perspective of resolving anxiety and nervous energy. Kang’s work implies that alongside the happiness that we are always trying to achieve, negative emotional responses also need to be emphasized as a large portion of urban life. Accompanied by an informative booklet that demonstrates the massage steps, audiences are invited to sit on the chairs provided, play the modified child game, and acquire the other participant's energy flow and warmth." -From the exhibition essay by Jenny (Yiping) Zhang Documentation by Roya DelSol

Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz & Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, Hands that gather and forget September 8th October 2nd, 2020 "Every December, Ana Luisa Bernardez Notz and Sebastian Rodriguez y Vasti return to Venezuela, where they are both from, to visit their families. On these trips, they take photographs; two separate individuals, two different families, one same country and one similar practice. These trips are overrun with emotion: of home, loss, comfort, fear. Es como una ...anticipacion, an anticipation, that the minute they land, something will be taken away. Photographs reconcile this loss and offer a way of addressing it. Due to the pandemic, the artists tell me they anticipate they will not be returning this coming December; and again, like the anticipation of leaving, the future holds an emptiness. Yet, in this moment of the pandemic, some of us have been gifted time. What questions have we finally asked, and answered, with this time? What can be created with the space made available by this collapse? Bernardez and Rodriguez have disinterred their archives for their exhibition, Hands that gather and forget, in the Project Space." -From the exhibition essay by Maria Isabel Martinez All documentation by Roya DelSol

Florence Yee, New words to describe old things September 8th October 2nd, 2020 This window exhibition takes into account its site as a storefront, the most accessible place of the gallery, and the one most similar to benign commercial spaces. A scrolling LED monitor sits above a large decorative knot. It has historically been used for recording events and places by the complexity, pattern, and colour of the knots. Although it is still present in spaces as mass-produced dec...oration, my practice questions what it means to bring knot-making skills back to diasporic youth as an intentional craft. As the knots are often seen as tacky or outdated, how can the agency of choosing the knots’ form change their significance? For example, the knots are usually accompanied by the words or , characters for happiness and fortune that are rooted in heteronormative and capitalist ideas of marriage and financial success. I am interested in new terms for gender non-conformity in the written Cantonese language, like the combination of the radical(water) and the character (person) to mean gender fluid. Stemming from a curiosity of traditional Chinese knot-making, the project took a turn into self-reflexive questions of cultural authority, the barriers to intergenerational learning in the diaspora (especially during a pandemic), and the pressure to create the most accurate and certain representation of tradition to an audience that is used to a kitschy ethnic exotica. The LED signage functions both as an externalization of these discussions, and false form of advertising in the neighbourhood. The residency project has been a process of removing and reinstating layers of legibility that are still in negotiation for me. -From the Exhibition essay by Marsya Maharani Documentation by Roya DelSol

Hi friends! In response to the rising numbers of COVID-19, we are implementing a couple of changes at Xpace. Our current round of exhibitions closed a couple of days early, to give our team the chance to regroup and figure out next steps. We know some of you were really looking forward to seeing these works in person, but hope you can understand that this decision was made with the health and safety of our staff and the community in our best interest.... We’re so grateful for all the talented artists and writers who made it happen! Thank you, and thanks to everyone who visited and tuned in online. You can view the photo documentation by Roya del Sol on this page and on our website. Our next round of exhibitions opens on October 9th with a couple of changes: Gallery hours are now from 1 - 4 PM Appointments are still mandatory, and all visitors must continue to comply with our health & safety protocols (no exceptions!) The amount of visits per appointment is now limited to 3 people, instead of 5 Staff members will now work remotely for alternating weeks to minimize risk of COVID-19 exposure We will be providing updates as the situation develops, and if you have any questions or concerns please reach out to [email protected]. Stay safe and take care! - Alexia, Natalie and Philip <3 Image: Forest Van Winkle, Secret From Two Wombs Ago, 2020. Photo credit: Roya DelSol

JOIN OUR TEAM The Digital Media Coordinator will work in collaboration with the Director and Programming Coordinators to develop and manage digital content and archiving for Xpace’s workshops, event and exhibition programming. This position is a part-time, 7-month contract commencing October 20, 2020. Compensation is $16.15/hour at 10-12 hours per week, which can be worked remotely if needed.... Full job description and requirements here: https://bit.ly/35L3hwF DEADLINE: October 12th @ 11:59 PM

Thank you Peripheral Review <3