Some kind of we
Documentation by Toni Hafkenschied
Curator
Art Gallery of Guelph
September 12, 2024 – December 15, 2024
Featuring Daze Jefferies, B.G-Osborne, Cleopatria Peterson, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, and Mirha-Soleil Ross
Some kind of we brings together works that approach t4t sensibilities, emphasizing networks of trans relationality, self-representation, cross-generational inheritance, desire, and love. A shorthand that emerged in the early 2000s, t4t was first used in Craigslist Personals by transgender and transsexual people seeking relationships with other trans people. Today, t4t has come to encompass not only circuits of desire between trans people, but also practices of solidarity and mutual aid within trans communities.
Reflecting an ongoing tradition of trans-centered artistic production in Canada over the course of three decades, Some kind of we includes video and print works by B.G-Osborne, Daze Jefferies, Cleopatria Peterson, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, and Mirha-Soleil Ross. These works unfold in the Art Gallery of Guelph’s physical space, and are paralleled by a distributed exhibition, emphasizing the connective role of distributed media such as video and self-published zines and newsletters within trans histories of pre- and early-internet activism and community-building.
Trans and non-binary people can register to receive the distributed exhibition here.
Robert Flack:
Eternal Trandscendent
Documentation by Toni Hafkenschied
Curator
Art Gallery of Guelph
September 12, 2024 – December 15, 2024
Drawing from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, Eternal Transcendent highlights a selection of photographic works by Robert Flack (Guelph, 1957-1993). Flack’s images manipulate representation through analog processes, superimposing photographs with drawn symbols and coloured gels. Produced after his HIV seroconversion, these assemblages demonstrate attentiveness to bodily transformation and the more-than-corporeal in a moment in which Flack was coming to terms with his own mortality. Faced with the failure of his own body, the artist turned to ideas of transcendence, envisioning a spiritual realm where he no longer needed his physical form.
This is the second solo exhibition of Flack’s work at the Art Gallery of Guelph, and the first since his passing in October 1993. In this re-presentation of these artworks, and in remembering Robert Flack and his prolific body of work, his undying energy is transformed, manifesting within the regenerative power of his photographs.
Indiscernible thresholds,
escaped veillances
Documentation by Toni Hafkenschied
Curator
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto: May 1, 2024 – July 27, 2024
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver: February 28, 2025 – April 13, 2025
Featuring Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Lucas LaRochelle, Joshua Schwebel, Chelsea Thompto, and Lan "Florence" Yee
Visibility has come to represent a dominant mode of inclusionary neoliberal politics through which transness is engaged in the mainstream, conflating representation with empowerment. Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances considers the invisible, the illegible, and the opaque as productive alternatives to contemporary trans hypervisibility, a circumstance wherein the realm of the representational risks becoming all that is offered to trans people, rather than material support or true sovereignty. This exhibition revels in the ineffable and unindexable qualities of transness, allowing disappearance to take on an unexpected political power, possessing a very different type of agency than visibility.
In his book Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant asserts that opacity subverts the extractive dimensions of knowing the other. Taking up this premise, the featured artists test the possibilities of opacity to negotiate presentations of transness, especially in relation to the archive. Responding to institutional and state archives as sites of surveillance and control, this exhibition wrestles with desires for access to a record of trans lives while simultaneously seeking alternatives to the archive’s imposing demands for trans legibility. Rather than approaching visibility as an issue to be resolved, these artists consider the potentials of retreating from view, framing opacity as a protective act, archival illegibility as an escape.
Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts
Documentation by Toni Hafkenschied
Curator
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto and The Jackman Humanities Institute
September 13, 2023 – June 21, 2024
Featuring Kasra Jalilipour, Jordan King, Kama La Mackerel, Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, and Lan "Florence" Yee
The archive has long been theorized as a structuring force that informs public memory, state narratives, and the making of official history. When trans and queer histories enter the archive, the conditions upon which they are absorbed are often those of surveillance, criminalization, coloniality, and degradation. More commonly, however, these histories do not make their way into official archives at all, which leads to a fragmented remembering of queer and trans pasts.
Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts grapples with the absences, erasures, and censorships that colour the queer and trans archive, seeking forms of documentation, storytelling, and memory-keeping that serve marginalized communities. Responding to the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2023–24 research theme Absence, this exhibition interrogates the gaps that puncture the queer and trans archive, making visible their political nature and proposing strategies for a future of queer and trans history-making that refuses the lens of the oppressor. Through fiction-making, critical imagining, and revisionism, the artists in Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts gesture at and supplement histories of queer and trans people that are insufficient, compromised, colonial, or simply absent.
gendertrash from hell:
to heaven
Film still from ALLO PERFORMANCE! Mirha-Soleil Ross and Mark Karbusicky, 2002
Co-curator, with Karina Iskandarsjah (as Crocus Collective)
Vtape
September 9, 2021
gendertrash from hell: to heaven presents three performance and video works by transsexual videographer, performance artist, sex worker, and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross: Tremblement de Chair (2001), Madame Lauraine’s Transsexual Touch (2001), and ALLO PERFORMANCE! (2002). This mini-retrospective looks back at Ross’s activism as it relates to pleasure, desire, and futurity. Each video work puts forward artistic strategies invested in a safer and more inclusive future, projecting fragments of a potential utopia into our contemporary lives. These works speak to Ross’s legacy of actualizing a potential heaven for trans people and sex workers through her videos, performance art, and activism in the 1990s and 2000s.
This program featured a live conversation with Monica Forrester, sex work activist and Program and Outreach co-ordinator for Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project. Since 1999, Monica has worked in various agencies to educate and make services accessible for trans folks, advocating for trans women to be allowed into women’s shelters and in creating policies to prevent shelters from discriminating against trans women.
the body as a fever dream
Documentation by Roya DelSol
Curator
Xpace Cultural Centre
October 9 – November 7, 2020
Featuring Séamus Gallagher, Eija Loponen-Stephenson, Sheri Osden Nault, Camille Rojas, Lauren Runions, and B Wijshijer
With accompanying movement workshop led by Danielle Smith
the body as a fever dream addresses the moments in which our understanding of and presence in our own bodies is fluctuating, moments in which we feel we do not wholly exist, moments where our physicality may encounter a limbo state between presence and absence. A digital dance performance acts as companion to the artworks in this exhibition, posing questions around how the body takes form in gallery settings and how meaning is made in the absence of performing bodies.
Documentation by Karina Iskandarsjah
this house,
made and mended by unbelonging hands
Co-curator, with Karina Iskandarsjah (as Riverdale Curatorial Projects / Crocus Collective)
Riverdale Hub Gallery
April 1 – June 30, 2021
Featuring Dayna Danger, Akash Inbakumar, Kaythi, Vincy Lim, Yahn Nemirovsky, and Cleopatria Peterson
this house, made and mended by unbelonging hands is a group exhibition of contemporary craft and zine works by emerging queer artists. Throughout history, queer people, and especially queer people of colour, have had to make their own spaces, their own communities, and their own systems of documenting their stories. this house, made and mended by unbelonging hands showcases artists whose work takes on expansive approaches to craft practices and speaks to this legacy of queer-spacemaking, kinship, and continual resistance across time. Dayna Danger, Akash Inbakumar, Kaythi, Vincy Lim, Yahn Nemirovsky, and Cleopatria Peterson present works that engage the longstanding tradition of queer craft as something that connects us to past and future queer ancestors.
Proof 27
Documentation by Darren Rigo
Curator
Gallery 44
October 29 – December 11, 2021
Featuring Shirin Fathi, Shohreh GolAzad, Karishma Pranjivan, and Xan Shian.
Proof is Gallery 44’s annual group exhibition of work by emerging Canadian artists, reflecting a range of current concerns and practices in contemporary photography and lens-based media.
The artists in Proof 27 hold and reshape the demarcation of space in their explorations of distance and closeness, separation and intimacy. They implement lens-based practices to perform an undoing of demarcation, destabilizing the boundaries through which we define proximity and intimacy and instead reframe understandings of space as multiple and interstitial. The works in Proof 27 plumb the depth of distance, forging an eclectic document of proximity, space and intimacy.
in the hole
Documentation by Karina Iskandarsjah
Co-curator with Silverfish
Trinity Square Video
December 9 – 22, 2023
Featuring Hannah Bullock, Melly Davidson, Saint Haarley (Shaza Tarig Elnour), Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph, abisola oni, and Sid Sharp
in the hole brings together physical manifestations of the works developed for Silverfish's third print publication. The featured artists put forward a divergent collection of holes: ranging from the erotic, to the erased, to the subterranean.
You're Always Coming
When I'm Going
Documentation by Philip Leonard Ocampo
Co-curator with Silverfish and the Art History Graduate Student Association at York University
Gales Gallery, York University
June 18 – June 22, 2022
Featuring Anna Daliza, Irum, Lina Wu, and Saysah Yoroonatii
You’re Always Coming When I’m Going considers transitions, both personal and historical, through representations of grief, relationality, consumption, and desire. To transition is to cross or go beyond, to enter a state of liminal looming uncertainty. This exhibition marks the launch of the second issue of Silverfish, showcasing works created during an eight-week residency program and working group.
now that the artifice is dissolved,
Documentation by Philip Leonard Ocampo
Co-curator with mg hamilton and Sameen Mahboubi
Hearth
November 14 – November 30, 2020
Featuring Jessica Kasiama, Alex Lepianka, Miao Liu, and B Wijshijer
now that the artifice is dissolved, examines manifestations of the cyborg through material and conceptual frameworks. This exhibition corresponds with the launch of the first issue of Silverfish, and showcases the works developed throughout the Silverfish workshop program by the inaugural cohort.