Overturned
with Stelios Karamanolis, Irini Miga, Tula Plumi, Jeanie Riddle, Yorgos Stankopoulos and YARISAL & KUBLITZ
Art Genève (January 30 - February 2, 2020)
As part of artgenève 2020, Daily Lazy Projects presents the work of six emerging artists in a presentation titled ‘Overturned’ curated by Anaïs Castro. The work of the two painters Stelios Karamanolis and Yorgos Stamkopoulos is defined by a common research that seeks a balance of shapes and colors. Irini Miga's work Ink Spill (I) captures the often invisible and repetitive labor of cleaning, putting on display what might otherwise be tucked away in the storage closet. The Canadian artist Jeanie Riddle presents sculptures made from the accumulation of layers of acrylic, a medium often reserved for painting, as well as colorful canvases carefully folded and placed on the ground. Tula Plumi manipulates materials used in the construction industry, such as wood and metal, to create aerial sculptures with organic shapes that recall awnings. Finally, Yarisal & Kublitz presents an amusing little bronze piece representing a booty.
photo credit: Irini Miga
Mystic Toolkit
with Isa Carrillo, Alex Coma, Hector Jimenez Castillo, OMSK Social Club, Marigold Santos and Jennifer Murphy
Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Pointe-Claire (January 26 - March 8, 2020)
A look at the recent resurgence of esoteric practices such as magic, tarot reading, numerology and astrology in contemporary popular culture. Rooted in the counterculture of the 1970s, this renascent movement carried by millennials informs the practice of today’s working creatives.
photo credit: Alexis Bellavance
Ground Control
co-curated with Verity Seward
with Andrea Acosta, Larissa Fassler, Mila Panic, Nina Wiesnagrotzki
R E I T E R Berlin Prospect (November 15, 2019 - January 11, 2020)
The neoliberal economic model that prevails across the world is at war with planetary boundaries. The irreparable impact of mass-agriculture, urbanism and resource extraction becomes increasingly evident and translates into the heightened frequency of natural disasters. Across the world, the scientific community’s message is clear and a feeling of precariousness - a lack of control - is beginning to seep into the human psyche.
»Ground Control« explores the tension between organic and architectural impulses and whether they can be successfully reconciled. Bringing together the work of four Berlin-based artists, Andrea Acosta, Larissa Fassler, Mila Panic and Nina Wiesnagrotzki, the exhibition yields an urgent reconsideration of our relationship to nature and space, eliciting new ways of inhabiting our environments that are in harmony with the complex dynamics that regulate the natural order.
Photo credit: psftca.com
Human Factors
co-curated with Terence Sharpe
with Monira Al Qadiri, Mit Borrás, Lou Cantor, Alex McLeod, Marcin Pietruszewski, Karim Paulina/ANON, Anna Uddenberg
Berlin Art Week (September 12-15, 2019)
Human Factors examines how objects, sound and spoken word affect the human body, its behaviour and cognitive functioning in relation to machines and their design. Given contemporary art’s proclivity for critical self-reflection and a longing for the outside, the exhibition disregards art’s faux-intent of politically soberish introspection in favour of assessing works through the concept of key performance indicators (KPI) - can a work of art demonstrate effectively that it achieves its key objectives? Would art be better off returning to formalism? The motivation is to take works based on their intent and display their viability in operating beyond just interesting perspectives, be it as objects of knowledge of simply beautiful useless things.
The works in this exhibition have been selected based on their attempted affect on the user, not based on functionality of ease, but functionality in terms of physical enhancement and cognitive edification.
The Department of Love
co-curated with Olivia Aherne, Paulina Ascencio and Celina Basra
New commissions by Débora Delmar, Jade Montserrat, Alvin Tran and Steven Warwick
Art Night London 2019 (June 22, 2019)
The Department of Love presents four newly commissioned performances by Débora Delmar, Jade Montserrat, Alvin Tran and Steven Warwick. Each work will explore the places, meanings and functions of love in today’s world and will carry audiences on a journey from Battle Bridge Place, along Kings Boulevard and underground at Kings Cross Tunnel. Delmar’s roaming performers will activate memories and experiences of being in love, while Montserrat will explore the transitional spaces between urban and rural, with a focus on the politics of representation and love as a strategy for survival. Tran’s Kundiman will explore practices of care and affection as well as love as ethics during times of uprootedness, while Warwick will give an address to audiences as Saint Pancras, a patron saint for employment and health. Hoping to situate the places, meanings and functions of love in contemporary society, the programme presents modes of resistance and tools for self-preservation, love, care and solidarity.
Photo credit: Justyna Fedec
Over My Black Body
co-curated with Eunice Bélidor
with Nakeya Brown, Marilou Craft, Erika deFreitas, Stanley Février, Amartey Golding, Manuel Mathieu, Chloé Savoie-Bernard
La Galerie de l’UQAM from May 16 - June 22, 2019
Over My Black Body is a collaborative project that was born out of a conversation between Eunice Bélidor and Anaïs Castro as they observed the ways in which bodies are codified in our contemporary societies. Through this continuous dialogue, Over My Black Body has become a tool to support the movement against the control of black bodies, to recognize the costumes imposed on them, while denouncing with insurgence the impunity given to institutionalized violence. The project favors an evolving mode and continues to take different forms and reach different audiences since its first iteration in Berlin in 2018.
The black body is the site of a long battle. Through history it fought for liberation from colonial power structures that exchanged it as a commodity. It is the blood, sweat and tears that built America and its first transnational industries: sugar cane, cotton, tobacco, etc. To this day the media controls the contextualisation of this body, lightening its skin when it is being praised and darkening it to demonize it. While its white peers enjoy popular codes portraying them as rational, sensible and cerebral, the black body is kept aside. The myth of blackness is one of an impulsive, irrational individual, violent in nature. If its body is celebrated for its physical abilities, particularly in the context of sporting events, these same prejudicial attributes serve to reinforce the idea of a powerful and dangerous body, one that is always a potential threat. It is precisely this myth that has cultivated the systemic racism that prevails across the Western world and that is at least responsible for the continued scrutiny and control of black bodies and more severely for the crisis that is the mass killing of black people in America and in the United Kingdom.
At Galerie de l’UQAM, Over My Black Body becomes a journey through which the visitor is invited to reflect on the many codes that harm the black body in our society. Despite its political nature, the project is also a celebration of black life, through North American and British manifestations. The participating artists manipulate the codes of their culture in ways that are simultaneously celebratory and defiant.
Photo credit: Philippe Chevrette
Catalogue
The Department of Love
co-curated with Olivia Aherne, Paulina Ascencio, Celina Basra and Tiange Yang
with aaajiao, Diego Ascencio, Ramiro Avila, Richard Brautigan, Feng Chen, Quiet Kate, Mountain River Jump!, Klara Ravat, Evelyn Taocheng-Wang, Alvin Tran, Steven Warwick and Xu Zhen
SAFA Gallery (December 2 - 13, 2018)
“If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition.” (T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, § 110)
Prompted by reflections on time and labour in the hyper-rapidly evolving context of art institutions and biennials, as well as on the structure and accelerated pace of the Shanghai Curators Lab, we present the Department of Love. Within this fictional institutional framework, moments of authenticity, self-preservation, love and care are staged to reveal (and stand in opposition to) the artificiality of vacuous institutional spaces, and the rhetorics of display and language they employ to assert themselves.
As a tool of capitalism and an act of resistance, as well as an independent voice of the heart, we hope to situate the places, meanings and functions of love in contemporary society. Why do we keep on returning to love and care as the ground and soil for our curatorial work? In this respect, the love of machines is just as relevant as the sentimentality of scent; the essential practice of breathing, tools for self-preservation and small ritualistic gestures, like the offering of rose tea - an act of hospitality that will circulate through the exhibition space.
Over My Black Body
co-curated with Eunice Bélidor
Screening and conference moderated by Mohammad Salemy
with Juliana Huxtable and Amartey Golding
Spike Berlin (July 5, 2018)
The history of black bodies is one of long struggle for liberation from superseding regulating white power structures. Viewed as a commodity during colonial times, the black body is the blood, sweat and tears behind the development of America’s first transnational industries: sugar canes, cotton, tobacco, etc. Black bodies continue to be heavily codified in contemporary societies. "Over My Black Body" is a collaborative project that acknowledges the lasting battles against the policing of black bodies and affirms the resolute rejection of the costumes imposed on them while denouncing with insurgence the impunity given to institutionalized violence. This first iteration of the project includes the presentation of two videos by Amartey Golding (UK) and Juliana Huxtable (USA) and brings the two artists together in conversation with Berlin-based curator Mohammad Salemy.
"Chainmail" (Golding) and "A Split During Laughter at the Rally" (Huxtable) both draw portraits of disparate communities and address questions of homophobia and intolerance, however, the aesthetic strategy of each artist is resolutely different. Golding plays on the juxtaposition of contrasts to turn on its head what initially seems like a threatening underground gathering into a supporting community of men cheering for their fellow’s triumph. In opposition, Huxtable taps into aesthetics of conspiracy and American paranoia and draws from the current framework of political unrest and community mobilization. The characters’ conversations and monologues move through several topics and various events which ultimately question whether the tools for democratic liberation, including the beat to which the characters are singing, are not in fact just another instrument of oppression.
Mutation|Transformation|Metamorphosis
with Patrick Bérubé, FAMED, Laurent Lamarche, Marie-Eve Levasseur, Karine Payette
Art Mûr Berlin (November 15 - December 13, 2017)
On August 29, 2016, the International Geological Congress voted to formally designate this geological era the Anthropocene. This was an important recognition of humans’ tremendous impact on the environment and the enduring consequences of plastic pollution, nuclear tests, mineral and gas extractions among others. The root cause of this revision is the acknowledgement of anthropocentricism, a belief that has been carried from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution and exacerbated through the twentieth century into the very foundation of our neoliberal societies. But recent history demonstrates that the greatest threat to this belief comes in the form of humanity’s own offspring: technology. Our generation is now facing a complex conflict within the contemporary trinity: Humans – Nature – Technology.
The artists brought together in this exhibition address the significant shifts in paradigms of existence that the collide of culture, nature and technology brings forward. Centered around three modes of alteration: Mutation, Transformation and Metamorphosis, this exhibition looks at how movements towards hybridization can free us from the tyranny of anthropocentricism and help us built a project for a brighter future.
The Tip of the Iceberg
with Sonny Assu, Patrick Bérubé, Simon Bilodeau,, Jannick Deslauriers, Karine Giboulo, Guillaume Lachapelle, Laurent Lamarche, Cal Lane, Marie-Ève Levasseur, Nadia Myre, James Nizam, Karine Payette
Bermondsey Project Space (November 1 - 15, 2017)
photo credit: Paulina Korobkiewicz
Self Abstractions
with Jannick Deslauriers, Cal Lane, Marie-Eve Levasseur, Nadia Myre, Jinny Yu
The High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom (September 15–November 18, 2017)
#self
with Erika deFreitas, Renato Garza-Cervera, Christos Pantieras, Jonathan Schipper
Festival Art Souterrain (February 27 - March 24, 2016)
photo credit: Natalie Artisson
Moving Still | Still Moving
with Lois Andison, William Basinski, Patrick Beaulieu, Jeffrey Blondes, Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller, Caroline Cloutier, Nicolas Grenier, Chris McCaw, Andréanne Michon, Faye Mullen, Jonathan Schipper, Kurt Stallaert, Capucine Vandebrouck
Art Mûr Montreal (March 7 - April 25, 2015)
Moving Still | Still Moving starts from the premise that nothing is static and that any change bears consequences. The works included in this exhibition are an invitation to meditate on the transformations that take place around us. While Andréanne Michon’s video reminds of the profound impact of human intervention on the environment, billions of years after their disappearance Caroline Cloutier maps the placement of the stars in architectural drawings that carry the sentiment that what we see is sometimes only the representation of an anachronistic present.
Our eyes regularly fool us into believing that things are immobile. Many works included in this exhibition will undergo a physical alteration over the duration of six weeks: some will grow and others will decay. But what bring all of them together are an intelligent consideration of a world in constant mutation and the recognition of the ephemeral nature of all things.
photo credit: Mike Patten
Catalogue
Monochrome³
with Yves Gaucher, Neil Harrison, Braden Labonté, Michelle Lundqvist, Guido Molinari, Barbara Todd, Claude Tousignant, Henri Venne, Jinny Yu
Art Mûr Montreal (January 18 – March 1, 2014)
“Colour is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.” -Kasimir Malevitch
The monochrome first made an appearance in the history of painting in the work of Russian artists Kasimir Malevitch and Aleksandr Rodchenko in the beginning of the 20th century. It was certainly a radical aesthetic declaration purposefully aiming to reveal mystical and spiritual truths through pure form and colour. But it was also a revolutionary affirmation with strong political ramifications that aimed to abolish traditional painting associated with monarchy, all the while establishing a new art paradigm. Its resurgence in subsequent decades in various parts of the world (in Italy, France, the USA and Japan, notably) invites to question what the abolishing of figuration asserts, what seeming inexhaustible potential artists find in the properties of simple colour and form and perhaps more significantly, what is, and has been at stake in the strategy of single-colour squares.
In Quebec during the post-war period, abstract art appeared with a rather similar agenda as in Russia half a century earlier. It became the banner call of a group of artists, known for signing the Refus global and whose cultural heritage in the Belle Province is largely appreciated as having prepared the grounds for the Quiet Revolution that began loosely a decade later.
photo credit: Mike Patten
Catalogue