EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS
Many of our faculty are well-known artists and curators, involved in exhibitions at Canadian and international venues that express their scholarly research interests and their artistic practices.
Exhibtion view at the Owens Art Gallery
Estuaries
Exhibition curated by Dr. Joana Joachim
Dr. Joana Joachim curated the exhibition Estuaries at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.
This project muses on Black diasporic peoples’ relationship to the ocean. Estuaries uses as an anchor the legacies of white settler civic leaders and entrepreneurs like John Owens, Robert Reed, and John Hammond, who, through their involvement in the connected industries of shipbuilding, trade, processing of raw materials and the funds they generated, profited from the stolen labour and disenfranchisement of Black people. This exhibition features artworks by both contemporary and historical artists, archival documents and artifacts, to contend with the tensions that arise once we allow the freshwater river of Canadian history to meet the ocean of Black Atlantic life.
Estuaries is on view from 5 October until 15 December, 2024.
Exhibtion view by Hania Ilahi. Courtesy of Centre A.
Green Swans: Wildfires and Rising Seas
Exhibition curated by Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim at Centre A
Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim curated Ramona Ramlochand’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver, for which the Montreal artist created an entire series of new photographic and video installations confronting the devastating impact of global warming on all the planet’s living species.
This exhibition is presented as part of Centre A’s 2024-2025 program celebrating the gallery’s 25th anniversary. The exhibition is also part of the program marking 20 years since the international 2004 conference and exhibition Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas, convened by Dr. Jim, and for which Ramona Ramlochand was an exhibiting artist.
Green Swans: Wildfires and Rising Seas is on view from September 21 until November 16, 2024.
Installation view showing the work of Marigold Santos
Drawing on Our History
Exhibition co-curated by Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim at the Carleton University Art Gallery
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the Carleton University Art Gallery invited five guest curators to co-curate a major exhibition on contemporary drawings. Each guest chose one Canadian artist to exhibit alongside the CUAG’s collection. Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim is part of the curatorial team and have invited Marigold Santos (MFA 2011) to show their work.
“Drawing on Our History” is on view from January 29 until May 7, 2023.
Blackity (2021-2022), vue d’exposition. Crédit photo : Paul Litherland, 2021
“Blackity”, Artexte
Montreal, Fall 2021 – Spring 2022
Dr. Joana Joachim
The cyclical dis-remembering of Black Canadian artistic practices has long been characteristic of art institutions on Turtle Island. Yet, as curator and researcher Andrea Fatona notes in an interview with artist and curator Liz Ikiriko, there are clear periods during which Black Canadian arts practitioners’ work makes itself known despite this phenomenon. Critical writing and archival documentation of these moments are crucial to the process of inscribing them into collective memory and into larger Canadian art historical discourses. Blackity delineates the trajectory of contemporary Black Canadian art as witnessed by Artexte’s collection between the 1970s and the 2010s. The exhibition gathers some key moments and people to consider the thematic, aesthetic or conceptual threads linking them to begin to trace a temporal cartography of Black Canadian art history.
EVENTS
Jagdeep Raina, The body with two silk borders, 2022, Mixed media on paper, 50 x 60 inches (127 x 152.4 cm)
Going Dark: Aesthetic Strategies and Anti-Colonial Solidarities
Thursday, November 2, 2023
In Fall 2023, Dr. Balbir Singh launched Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy at Concordia University. The inauguration event “Going Dark” centered an expansive and experimental dialogue with scholars, activists, and practitioners from across Turtle Island who work at the nexus of race, empire, carcerality, and anti-colonial visual cultures.
Home/Making
April 27-May 13, 2023
Dr. Elaine Cheasly Paterson co-organised this series of events, which includes a residency, workshop series, research-creation exhibition, and a hybrid symposium, at the intersection of two concepts: craft and home.
The Home/Making project brought scholars, makers, and members of the Concordia and Montreal communities together to create an accessible public forum for a continued conversation at the intersection of craft and home, through workshops, panel discussions, lectures, and engagement with research creation. The project provided a transdisciplinary platform for critical discussion of research and research-creation, with an attention to situated and tactile knowledges, towards generating both material literacy and new scholarly perspectives.
Embodied Stories: Gender, the Body, and Oral History
June 6, 2021
In 2020-21, Dr. Cynthia Hammond organized a week of activities on the theme of gender, the body, and oral history as part of a bi-annual exchange between the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (Concordia University) and the Scottish Oral History Centre (University of Strathclyde), called the "Summer Institute". This event, which ran from 10-15 June 2021, included over 30 short research papers, live conversations, workshops, and a podcast with Concordia's new Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Oral Tradition and Oral History, Dr. Bimadoshka Pucan, and human rights expert and COHDS affiliate, Dr. Nancy Tapias Torrado.
Community, Conservation, Activism: Montréal as a City of Neighbourhoods
April 17, 2021
In 2020-21, Dr. Cynthia Hammond organized the half-day “City Seminar” that is an annual feature of the Society of Architectural Historians conference, which in 2021 was focused on Montreal. The event included a keynote lecture by Phyllis Lambert, long-time urban activist and founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; Nakuset, an Indigenous activist and executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal; Eunice Bélidor, Curator of Quebec and Canadian Contemporary Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Dr. Laurence Parent, postdoctoral researcher on urban space and disabilities and Candidate de Projet Montréal au poste de conseillère d'arrondissement dans le district De Lorimier; and urban activist and member of Montreal's Little Burgundy community, Oumalker Idil Kalif. The event took place on 17 April 2021 and had over 300 registrants.
The Art History Vitrine hosts month-long exhibitions curated by professors and graduate students – often using original works by Concordia students.
