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.
Images 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.
now that the artifice is dissolved,
Images by Philip Leonard Ocampo
Co-curator with Greta 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 Magazine, and showcases the works developed throughout the Silverfish workshop program by the inaugural cohort.
the body as a fever dream
Images 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.