Descendance

Extended: May 20 - October 2, 2022

Descendance explores themes of identity and a sense of belonging that come from one's personal family history and inherited cultural traditions. Drawing from acts of storytelling and memory-keeping, the exhibition explores the intentional or sometimes unintentional selection of which memories are preserved and which ones are left behind. The exploration of carefully crafted histories can unearth and inform a sense of ‘place’; the way in which one’s history is tied to the land, and to each other. How does one grow new roots in relation to our stories, our communities and our adopted lands?

Descendance is co-curated by Myriam Farah Cobb and Darren Pottie in consultation with a wide range of Canadian curators and artists from across the country. Featuring first-generation Canadian and immigrant artists, this deeply intimate exhibition invites visitors to reflect on their own lineage and how their past impacts their present and influences the future.

Descendance explore les thèmes de l'identité et du sentiment d'appartenance découlant de notre propre histoire familiale et des traditions culturelles héritées. S'inspirant des actes de narration et de conservation de la mémoire, l'exposition explore la sélection intentionnelle ou parfois involontaire des souvenirs qui sont conservés et de ceux qui sont laissés derrière. L'exploration d'histoires soigneusement élaborées peut mettre à jour et informer un sens du "lieu" ; la manière dont notre histoire personnelle est liée à la terre et aux autres. Comment pouvons-nous faire pousser de nouvelles racines en relation avec nos histoires, nos communautés et nos terres d'adoption ?

Descendance est organisée conjointement par Myriam Farah Cobb et Darren Pottie, en consultation avec un large éventail de conservateurs et d'artistes canadiens à travers le pays. Mettant en vedette des artistes immigrants et des Canadiens de première génération, cette exposition profondément intime invite les visiteurs à réfléchir à leur propre lignée et à la façon dont leur passé influence leur présent et aussi leur avenir.

DESCENDANCE Artist + Curator Talk
Thursday, September 22

The SPAO Centre proudly presents DESCENDANCE Artist and Curator Talk featuring curators Myriam Farah Cobb and Darren Pottie, along with artists Farihah Aliyah Shah, Leila Fatemi, and Kosisochukwu Nnebe.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s artistic practice is based in performance art, photography, video, VR, AR and 3D printing within the contemporary context of global feminism. Dong’s work deals with cultural intersections created by globalization and asks what it means to be a citizen of the world today. Working within the gap between body as image and body as experienced reality Dong uses the body—often their own body— as a visual territory in their work and a primary material to activate social commentary on gender, identity, and immigration. Dong currently focuses on art and technology.

I Have Been There is an on-going public intervention performance that explores belonging, diaspora, and existence in public spaces. Each time I travel to a new place, I make a new duvet with Chinese traditional embroidered silk fabric. Covered by the duvet, I lie on the ground of historical sites, landmarks, tourist attractions, and other significant places or events as a sign of negotiating and/or engaging with cultures and spaces.

Leila Fatemi

Leila Fatemi is an emerging artist, curator and community arts worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Living between cultures, her work and curatorial endeavours stem from her daily experiences as a visible minority and her perspective as a practicing Muslim woman artist. Fatemi aims to provide platforms and contribute alternative narratives to conversations of ethnic representation with a focus on the experience of Muslim women & women from the MENA region as well as to create a better understanding and appreciation for Islamic culture and traditions.

In The Wandering Veil the artist reflects on her personal experience as a Muslim woman engaged in the spiritual and intimate act of worship. This series of self-portraits considers the depth of meaning that the veil embodies; a practice symbolic of both esoteric and exoteric life.

Christina Hajjar

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese Canadian artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labour.

A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge.

Liz Ikiriko

Liz Ikiriko is a Tkaronto/Toronto-based, Nigerian Canadian artist and curator. Her role as an educator, maker, and mother informs her practice, which focuses on African and diasporic narratives. Through collaboration and research, she supports and creates embodied experiences to facilitate moments of vulnerability and care for her communities. Ikiriko holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University (2019). She is the Curator of Collections and Contemporary Engagement at AGYU and co-curator of Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennale(2022). Her work has been shown nationally, and is part of the permanent collection of the Dunlop Art Gallery, SK. Her writing has appeared in Aperture Books, Public Journal, MICE Magazine, C Magazine and Blackflash.

Facing the Precipitous is a part of the series – Flags of Unsung Countries developed in the aftermath of a daughter losing her father. This work contends with family histories, fragmented memories and considers new ceremonies to honour our ancestors, who persevered on adopted homelands.

Kamissa Ma Koïta

Kamissa Ma Koïta a.k.a. LADX is a Canadian-Malian artist and activist. Native of Quebec city, they grew up in Montreal. They hold a bachelor's degree in visual and media arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal (2015) and have been a human rights activist for more than 10 years. From a queer and Afrocentrist perspective, they question the vectors of social domination, focusing more particularly on the condition of marginalized communities.

The photograph Reenactment. Nous serons universel.le.s was produced alongside the performance Nous serons universel.le.s. In reference to the 70th anniversary of the Refus global manifesto, the work led the public to question their social privileges and the under-representation of black communities. The work recreates, through the organization of the subjects and the decor, a famous portrait of the Automatists produced by Maurice Perron during the group's second exhibition in 1947. The Galerie de l'UQAM purchased this work in 2020.

Kriss Munsya

Kriss Munsya is a Congolese-born visual artist currently living in Vancouver, BC. He grew up in Brussels, Belgium in the ‘90s, and that era was very important for him. As a first-generation African immigrant, Munsya was consistently confronted with normalized and often violent racism from a young age. These experiences fed his vision of the world and himself within it.

Highway Reflection: He was road tripping with his parents and his older sister to Germany that summer. They stopped at a really low budget hotel on the highway. He was 6 years old. He remembers he couldn’t sleep that night because of the sound of the highway. The next day, his father and him played soccer in the parking lot while his sister and mom were hanging out on the grass. Suddenly the ball went a little closer to the fences of the parking lot, close to the highway. On the other side of the highway, he could see another highway hotel. But that one was a fancy one. He could see rich white families in the pool. He remembers the patio was full of flowers. He was really jealous, and maybe a bit mad at his parents for staying in that low budget one. He wanted to be on the other side of the highway. It took him years to understand that he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Now that he’s older, he’s trying to reclaim the past he never had. He’s trying to change his memories in order to change his future. But digging the past might bring up unexpected things.

The Eraser juxtaposes experiences of the past with desires of the future. It is a story of change and transformation that centers a Black man revisiting experiences that have been normalized in critical reflection of internalized supremacy. Things that at the time he thought were normal now have new meaning and he wants to share the lessons within.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist. Using phenomenology as a methodology,  Nnebe’s practice makes use of hesitation as a generative form of affect that opens the viewer and the artist herself up to new forms of understanding. Touching on themes such as the process of racialization, diasporic experience, and epistemic violence and restitution, her work takes her lived experience as a starting point for engaging viewers on issues both personal and structural in ways that bring awareness to their own imbrication and complicity. 

“My mother was my first home / bury me on my father's land” is a set of custom stamps that speak to the artist's three nationalities: Nigerian, Biafran and Canadian. The work takes as its foundation stamps initially printed by the Nigerian state but later repurposed by the recently created Republic of Biafra (a secessionist state created by the Igbo, whose birth and demise marked the beginning and end of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war) as a way of signaling its sovereignty on the international stage. Brought together in one stamp (a stamp issued and legitimated by the Canadian state), alongside photographs of her parents, the work speaks to contesting claims to nationhood, sovereignty and belonging. Beginning with the set of custom stamps, the work will evolve as the artist uses the stamps to send letters home to family in Nigeria and collects the return correspondence  as a way of speaking to histories of migration and diasporic ties and kinship.

Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Through her performative video works and photographs, Dainesha Nugent-Palache explores the dichotomies and paradoxes inherent in representations of Afro-Caribbean femininities. Dainesha’s artwork flirts with anthropological and archaeological realms, often produced as a result of her familial digging. Her practice is concerned with visualizations of Black diaspora across pasts, presents, and speculative futures, producing portraits and other still life-based works. With an exuberant approach to colour and display, Dainesha’s work often negotiates with forms of glamour, excess, and other photographic strategies inherent to the visual cultures of capitalism.  

Dainesha Nugent-Palache (b. Toronto, ON.) holds a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University (2016) where she was the recipient of The Dorothy Hoover Research Award. Her work has been exhibited Nationally in Canada and internationally in New York, Finland, and Vienna. She currently lives and works in Toronto, ON. and is a founding member of Toronto artist collective and gallery the plumb.

Ananna Rafa

Ananna Rafa is a photographer and painter based in Toronto. Her work oscillates between places, memories, and identity. Her art practice is primarily image-based with an emphasis on the immigrant experience—often referencing art history, performance, and cinema from the South Asian diaspora. As a person of Bengali heritage, her work highlights the cultural and socio-political narratives of this region while at the same time introducing these concepts to a western audience.

Borrowing from 16th and 17th century Mughal Miniature paintings, “After Mughal Miniatures“ retraces Rafa's cultural history through performative acts of storytelling,  traditional attire, festivals and rituals found both in Bengali and Mughal cultures. Engaging three generations of Bengali women, this series is also an attempt to speak to the syncretic nature of cultural identity and religion.”

Farihah Aaliyah Shah

Farihah Aliyah Shah is a contemporary lens-based artist originally from Edmonton, Alberta now based in Bradford, Ontario, Canada. Utilizing photography, installation and the moving image, Shah’s practices explore issues of identity formation through the colonial gaze, land, collective memory and archival material. She seeks to challenge the lack of representation of disenfranchised bodies in the photographic cannon and representational art, encouraging others to take agency of their image. 

Using self-portraiture and simple installations, Billie Said ‘Strange Fruit’ aims to respond to the current Black Lives Matter movement and past civil rights movements advocating for justice and equality whilst commenting on the lack of representation of black bodies in the history of photography. The series reflects on the significant history of still-life photography and botanical objects and challenges the viewer to elevate fragmented or disenfranchised bodies to the same respect as the popularly photographed succulent. The series lends its name from the 1930s poem “Strange Fruit” which was popularized by Billie Holiday. The poem speaks about the common practice of lynching in the American South. Despite the literal disappearance of this act, the figurative and systemic lynching of black bodies from the contemporary socio-political discourse remains. The series is dedicated to my Uncle Bob, a civil rights activist.

Newfoundland

Philippa Jones
Eastern Edge

Nova Scotia

Naila Moon
Independent

Sherida Hassanali
ISANS

New Brunswick

Annie France Noel
Galerie Sans Norm