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.