Inaugural Exhibit at COHDS – Bodies Carrying: Traces and Stories

Bodies carry and transmit traces of memories, sites, and stories — both as acts of care and as burdens to bear.

Bodies Carrying: Traces & Stories is a twofold conversation taking the form of a group exhibition and a program consisting of workshops, performances, and talks. This is an experiment in transforming the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling into a dialogue space that brings together artists and researchers who engage with or reflect on oral history in their work, from the curatorial process to the mise en œuvre.

The exhibition and program explore the traces we carry—the traces of what was willingly or unwillingly passed on, those that were inflicted, and the lingering ghosts of what was left behind.

These imprints can be things we hold onto or want to make more visible, carried through acts of care, (re)connection, and resistance. Yet, these traces also represent the weight of what bodies have borne and still bear. Bodies Carrying: Traces & Stories asks: How do we hold space for both the tenderness and heaviness of what it means to carry?

Exhibition Hours: May 1 – May 16
Open daily from: 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Dates: May 5 – May 8
Please register for individual events.

About the speaker

Annie Thao Vy Nguyen (they/she) is a Master’s student in Geography and Urban Studies at Concordia University, exploring queer futurity and political imagination through dialogic processes. Their thesis uses oral history to trace the evolution of queer Asian activism in Montreal across generations, using Chinatown as a case study. Annie holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Université de Montréal, with a thesis at the Technical University of Munich on inquiry-based exhibition pedagogy, where they co-developed and co-taught a course on pedagogy in architecture exhibitions. Trained and soon-to-be certified in Philocreation dialogue facilitation, Annie used these tools to facilitate this exhibition and program through a curatorial dialogue with all contributors.