EXHIBITION

Born 1984, London, UK
Drawing on his Ghanaian roots, Larry Achiampong’s solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural, and post-digital identities. With increased sharing of information via the Internet, the idea of a one-size-fits-all version of history continues to be challenged and rewritten. Achiampong cratedigs the vaults of history, and splices the aural and visual qualities of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal the sociopolitical contradictions in contemporary society. Achiampong’s works examine his communal and personal heritage—in particular, the intersection between pop culture and the postcolonial situation, using performance to investigate “the self” as a fiction and devising alter-egos pointing toward divided selves.

Born 1965, Birmingham, UK
Hurvin Anderson uses photographs and personal memories to create works that range from delicate paintings on vellum to large canvases occupying entire walls. His paintings and works on paper engage with issues of identity and representation, depicting places where memory and history converge. Anderson’s scenes often shift between abstract and representational focus and across genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture. Certain themes that recur in his work, such as barbershop interiors and public parks, are drawn from memories of his upbringing in Birmingham’s Afro-Caribbean community in the 1970s and 80s, as well as his time spent living in Trinidad as an artist-in-residence, where he became intimately familiar with Caribbean topography and aesthetic motifs such as decorative fences and metal grilles. Combining the experiences of his parents’ generation with those of his own, Anderson assembles his own fictional, imagined landscapes based on the conflation of photographs with remembered scenes, creating poetic and reflective compositions of spaces that exist “in-between.”

Born 1978, Shiraz, Iran
Kamrooz Aram’s diverse practice engages the complex relationship between traditional non-Western art and Western modernism. Working in a variety of media, including painting, collage, drawing, and installation, Aram uses image-making as a critical device to effect a certain renegotiation of history. His paintings reveal the essential role of ornament in the development of modern art in the West. Aram complicates the relationship between ornament and decoration, situating the history of ornament as a drive toward an absence of figuration, a movement toward abstraction. Another aspect of his practice considers the carefully constructed neutrality of museum displays as a primary site for encountering artworks. Functioning together with the reproduction and circulation of works in catalogues and art history texts, this mode of display historicizes works of art in their original context, often inculcating a sense of cultural nostalgia. Through photography, collage, and installation, Aram teases out the techniques of temporal and cultural distancing through which artworks become contextualized and are reframed as artifacts.

Born 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic
Firelei Báez lives and works in New York City. She creates intricate works on paper and canvas that are intrinsically indebted to a rigorous studio practice. Báez also works in large-scale sculpture. Informed by a convergence of interests in anthropology, science fiction, Black female subjectivity and women’s work, her works explore the humour and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies. As such, Báez’s practice reflects the ability of persons in such societies to live with cultural ambiguities and use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasion.

Born 1980, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
A multidisciplinary artist, Moridja Kitenge Banza expresses himself through painting, photography, video, drawing, and installation. His process is situated at the intersection of reality and fiction, a lens through which he questions the histories, memories, and identities of the places in which he has lived in relation to the positions he has occupied while residing there. Kitenge Banza intentionally confuses fact and fiction to problematize hegemonic narratives and create spaces wherein marginalized discourses may flourish. Drawing from past and present situations, the artist organizes, assembles, and traces figures as would a land surveyor, reappropriating codes from cultural, political, social, and economic milieux.

Born 1934, Bartica, Guyana
At the age of 19, Frank Bowling left his home in Guyana and moved to London. There he would study painting at the Royal College of Art, alongside David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj. After graduating with a silver medal, he spent the next sixty years criss-crossing the Atlantic between studios in London and New York. Maturing into a master of his medium, Bowling developed a visionary approach that fuses abstraction with personal memories. Now 86, he continues to paint every day, experimenting with new materials and techniques. For more than five decades, his distinct painting practice was marked by the integration of autobiography and postcolonial geopolitics into abstraction. A move to New York in the mid-1960s exposed Bowling to his American contemporaries and soon won him a place in the 1971 Whitney Biennial. As Maya Jaggi writes: “unlike contemporaries who founded British pop art, Bowling took a singular path, from Bacon-esque figurative painting to an abstract art touched by personal memory and history.... Encouraged by the American critic Clement Greenberg, Bowling found a freedom in abstract art, alongside his contemporaries, such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

Born 1985, Pittsburgh, USA
Cy Gavin often incorporates unusual materials into his paintings, such as tattoo ink, pink sand, diamonds, staples, Bermudiana seeds and cremains. He also works in sculpture, performance and video. Many of Gavin’s paintings explore ideas of identity and disarticulation from one’s culture that embody the artist’s relationship to the United States, Africa, Bermuda, and the history of slavery, which remains institutionally obfuscated on the island. Gavin often critiques notions of identity, history and colonialism, and has incorporated complicated themes of land, sexuality, elation and euphoria, trauma, and the African diaspora into his paintings and video works. The artist’s work has been strongly influenced by the writings of historian and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, especially his seminal book of essays The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois, as well as nkisi nkondi—objects infused with spirits and religious idols from the Congo—are central themes in his paintings in Overture. Gavin grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania, a steel and coal-mining town some twenty miles south of Pittsburgh. His mother and father both worked in the region’s glass factories.

1945–2017, North Philadelphia, USA
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career (from photography to landscape painting), Hendricks’s best-known works took the form of life-size painted oil portraits of Black Americans. Hendricks was professor emeritus of studio art at Connecticut College, in New London, Connecticut, where he taught drawing, illustration, oil and watercolour painting, and photography from 1972 until his retirement in 2010. In the mid-1960s, on a tour of Europe, he fell in love with the portrait style of artists such as van Dyck and Velázquez. As the Black Power movement gained momentum, Hendricks set about to correct an imbalance, appropriating the painting traditions he had seen in Europe and creating life-size portraits of friends, relatives, and strangers encountered on the street, portraits that communicated a new assertiveness and pride among Black Americans. In these portraits, he attempted to imbue his subjects with a proud, dignified presence. Hendricks frequently painted Black Americans against monochrome interpretations of northeastern American urban backdrops. His work is considered unique in its marriage of American realism and postmodernism. Although Hendricks did not position his subjects as celebrities, victims, or protesters, the people depicted in his works resonate with the voices of under-represented Black Americans of the 1960s and 1970s.

Born 1954, Zanzibar, Tanzania
Lubaina Himid is a British artist and curator, as well as a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities. Himid was one of the first artists involved in the UK’s Black Art movement in the 1980s and continues to create activist art, which is shown in galleries in Britain and worldwide. Himid was appointed MBE in June 2010 for “services to black women’s art,” won the Turner Prize in 2017, and was made a CBE in December 2018 “for services to art.” Himid was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar (then a British protectorate, now part of Tanzania) in 1954 and moved to Britain with her mother, a textile designer, following the death of her father when she was just four months old. A pioneer of the British Black Arts movement during the 1980s and 90s, Himid has long championed marginalized histories. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and textile works critique the consequences of colonialism and question the invisibility of people of colour in art and the media. While larger historical narratives are often the driving force behind her images and installations, Himid’s works beckon viewers by attending to the unmonumental details of daily life. Bright, graphic, and rich in colour and symbolic references, her images recall historical paintings and eighteenth-century British satirical cartoons. In many works, the presence of language and poetry—sometimes drawn from works by writers such as Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill or James Baldwin—punctuates the silence of her images with commands, instructions or utterances that are both stark and tender.

Born 1969, London, UK
Bharti Kher’s œuvre spans more than two decades and includes paintings, sculptures, and readymade objects and installations. Her chimeras, mythical monsters, and allegorical tales combine references that are at once topical and traditional, political and postcolonial. Kher studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, London, and later received her BA (hons.) in painting from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1991. She moved to India in 1993 and continues to live and work in New Delhi. She has exhibited extensively internationally, and her work is held in major collections around the world. Kher is widely known for her signature use of the bindi in her paintings and sculptural works. Derived from the Sanskrit word bindu—meaning point, drop, dot, or small particle—and rooted in ritual and philosophical traditions, the bindi is a dot applied to the centre of the forehead as a representation of a spiritual third eye. Originally applied with natural pigment, bindis have transformed over time to become a popular, mass-produced accessory. Kher reclaims this way of seeing by creating lavish, intensely layered “paintings” charged with the bindi’s conceptual and visual links to ideas such as repetition, sacredness and ritual, appropriation, and markers of the feminine. The bindi becomes a language or code, which we may begin to read through works that elicit formal connections as abstract expressionism, op art, and geometric abstraction, and the Tantric and neo-Tantric traditions of India. Kher states: “I activate the surface for you to imagine the microcosmic and macro. Remember also that the work looks back at you.”

Born 1973, Burnaby, Canada
Rick Leong’s painted landscapes are rooted in a bilingual vocabulary and style. Drawn from observation and influenced by classical Chinese paintings, imagery and symbols, his large-scale paintings incorporate a holistic view of the Canadian landscape and the artist’s relationship to it. Leong’s pursuit and recording of nature abides by the terms of traditional landscape painting, a strategy by which he disseminates an ongoing relational narrative. With attention to environmental changes in botany—such as temporal and meteorological conditions—the artist reimagines the natural world. Light becomes solid and massive, and rainbows become architectural. One is tempted to dwell in the poetry of experience. Painting no longer requires that the artist work solely from memory. What is not remembered accurately is invented, forming a synthesis of inspiration, observation, memory and imagination.

Born 1986, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu is known for his paintings, which investigate themes of historical violence and erasure, as well as Haitian visual cultures of physicality, nature and religious symbolism. Marrying abstract and figurative techniques, his compositions carve out space for us to reflect on Haiti’s transformative history, while inviting us to consider the different futures that the act of remembering creates. Drawing from a wide range of subjects, Mathieu’s practice combines his Haitian heritage with his formal art education, which culminated in an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Born 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas and overlaid with marks in pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place, as well as a collapse of art-historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of abstract expressionist colour field painting. In her intensely worked canvases, Mehretu creates new narratives that combine abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark-making—a means, for the artist, of signifying social agency and suggesting the unravelling of a personal biography. Mehretu’s points of departure are architecture and the city, particularly the accelerated, compressed and densely populated urban environments of the twenty-first century. Her canvases layer different architectural features, such as columns, façades and porticos, with geographical diagrams, such as charts, building plans, city maps and architectural renderings seen from multiple perspectives—aerial, cross-sectional and isometric. Her paintings present a tornado of visual incidents wherein gridded cities become fluid and flattened like layers of urban graffiti. Mehretu has described her rich canvases as “story maps of no location,” seeing them as windows into an imagined, rather than actual, reality. Through a cacophony of marks, her works seem to represent the speed of the modern city, depicted, perhaps contradictorily, with the timeless materials of pencil and paint.

Born 1985, New York City, USA
Jordan Nassar’s favourite subject is landscape. He embroiders his compositions, which are framed by and built up through repeat patterns adapted from traditional Palestinian motifs. At first glance, his scenes seem innocuous enough, comprised of rolling hills rendered sometimes in vibrant shades of red and at others in more muted grays and browns. The hills are framed by a dramatically hued sky: often blue, as one might expect, but sometimes pink or orange. The effect is of distant peaks dappled by the rays of the setting sun in late summer. This idyll, seemingly an abstract view that could well be anywhere, turns out to be imaginary yet specific. Of Palestinian descent but born and raised in New York City, Nassar uses his work to evokes a particular kind of imagined space: the sort of utopian vision of Palestine held by the displaced constituents of the region’s diaspora. In devising these landscapes, Nassar always works from his imagination rather than from photographs. His spaces are visionary and hopeful, but also tinged with the recognition of an inescapable fact—that their realization is foreclosed, at least for now, by political realities. Looking at the artist’s seemingly anodyne landscape images, we are connected to the works’ deeper context by the physical lens through which they are fashioned and framed: the traditional Palestinian patterns from which Nassar composes his canvases.

Born 1933, Tokyo, Japan
Yoko Ono is a visionary, pioneering artist with a career that now spans over fifty years. During the 1950s, in Tokyo, she introduced original questions concerning the concept of art and the art object, breaking down the traditional boundaries between branches of art. She has been associated with conceptual art, performance, Fluxus, and happenings of the 1960s and is one of very few women to have participated in these movements. Through her works of instructions and performances, as well as her activism, she has created a new kind of relationship with spectators and with fellow artists, including her late husband John Lennon, inviting them to play an active part in the creative process. She also brings together two cultures—Eastern and Western—which extend and strengthen each other in continuous innovation.

Born 1979, Chicago, USA
Maia Cruz Palileo is a multidisciplinary, Brooklyn-based artist. Migration and a permeable conception of home are constant themes in her paintings, installations, sculptures, and drawings. Influenced by the oral history of her family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history shared by the two countries, Palileo infuses these narratives with memory and imagination. When stories and memories are subjected to time and constant retelling, such narratives become questionable, straddling the line between fact and fiction while remaining cloaked in the convincingly familiar. Palileo spent the summer of 2017 researching images from the US colonial period in the Philippines at Chicago’s Newberry Library. She studied Damián Domingo’s watercolours of people living in and around Manila in the 1820s, the folklorist and revolutionary book El Folk-lore Filipino, published by Isabele de los Reyes in 1889, and the Dean C. Worcester collection of ethnographic photographs from the years 1899 to 1903. Worcester was an American zoologist who became Secretary of the Interior for the United States government. His collections encompass multiple perspectives on the events of the nineteenth century, including the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine-American War. Together, they present an image of Filipinos as constructed through both native eyes and the eyes of the other. This phenomenon mirrors the fractured feeling of multiplicity and shallowness that many of Palileo’s generation describe when asked about Filipino-American identity and historical understanding.

Born 1985, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Rajni Perera explores issues of hybridity, sacrilege, irreverence, the indexical sciences, ethnography, gender, sexuality, popular culture, deities, monsters and dreamworlds. All of these themes come together in a newly objectified realm of mythical symbioses. They are flattened on the medium and made to act as a personal record of impossible discoveries. In her work, Perera seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of these scripturally existent, self-invented, and externally defined icons. She creates a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourses and acts as a restorative force through which people can shift outdated, repressive modes of being and reclaim their power.

Born 1958, Taipei, Taiwan
As a Taiwanese-born who lives in Canada and has experienced marginalization, through his work Ed Pien celebrates diversity and seeks to champion those who have less autonomy and agency. He is interested in the myriad ways in which different cultural systems impact who we are and how, as individuals, we can negotiate and act in the world in responsible, respectful, and empathetic ways. In the process of researching and making art, Pien contemplates notions of loss, mourning, empathy, resilience, and healing. In his work, he gravitates toward creating immersive installations and fostering moments of curiosity, wonder, and enchantment for viewers of his art. Pien employs strategies of display that heighten these qualities. The powerful role played by museum archives, the affect of material evidence, the persuasive power of images and artifacts, the ways in which they are presented to help constitute collective memory, the impact of officially constructed narratives, and how they influence interpretation and elicit responses from visitors all influence Pien’s thinking and making. Fundamentally Pien aims to realize poetic, engaging art that is imbued with emotional, physical, and conceptual resonance.

Born 1981, Manila, Philippines
Marigold Santos pursues an interdisciplinary art practice involving drawn, painted and printed works, as well as sculpture, animation and sound. When she first immigrated to Canada, she lost touch with her culture. But now, identity is what empowers her. Santos’s interest lies in transformation, as she reflects on fleeting childhood memories and her family’s immigration to Canada as an autobiographical point of departure. Experiences as history, fragmented into memory and retold as personal myth are negotiated through the act of drawing but also operate as narrative. This is the realm of play in which Santos situates her work. Notions of attachment/separation and being grounded or uprooted ultimately relate back to investigations of “self” and “home” and are explored through an invented temporality (wherein the artist looks forward, sideways, and upside-down while simultaneously looking backward into a history never physically lived) manifesting in conceptual hybrids and multiple, distributed selves. In these recent works, imagery arises from the otherworldly; figures mobilize and embrace growth, transience and a self in process. The works provide loopholes as points of entry, which make the viewer aware of the contradictions that dwell within but do not seek to ameliorate awkwardness or discomfort. Santos draws her imagery from ambiguity and a lack of absolutes, resulting in a visual narrative that is disjointed, accumulative and plural. It has become Santos’s personal language for storytelling, a language that continues to change and evolve, that is constantly being defined by the relationship of one image to the next, and that embraces precariousness.

Born 1962, London, UK
Born in London, Yinka Shonibare CBE moved to Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of three. He returned to London to study fine art, first at Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design) and then at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he received his MFA. Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and film. Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. His trademark material is the brightly coloured “African” batik fabric, which he buys in London. This type of fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch, and eventually sold in the colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s, the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.

Born 1978, Virginia, USA
Shanna Strauss is a Tanzanian-American artist living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal). As a Tanzanian-American, biracial, bilingual woman, Strauss has always been interested in the realities of having to navigate multiple identities, geographic locations, histories, and cultures. Using a mixed-media approach, she currently explores themes related to identity and belonging: in particular, what the people of the African Diaspora bring with them when they settle in new locations, and how they inform the social fabric of the places they call home. In a North American context, the personal stories and societal contributions of Black people are often left out of public narratives. Strauss aims to share these stories through visual media. The works she creates are deeply personal and, as such, are informed by her political positionality. As a Black woman, feminist, community worker and artist, Strauss’s identity is multifaceted and has been shaped by the people she has encountered in her life and who have empowered her. The photographs she uses are predominately images of people who represent a part of her and the different communities to which she is connected. The people who Strauss portrays tell a part of her own story and are threads in the web of her kinship relations and of the broader African Diaspora.

Born 1987, San Francisco, USA
Jessica Sabogal is a queer Colombian-American muralist from San Francisco whose large-scale public artworks attempt to document and disrupt. She births her creations from the following framework: “As artists, it is our duty to uplift the sacredness of women, people of colour, the differently abled, queer and trans folks, immigrants and the undocumented, and our Indigenous brothers and sisters, who continue to face ongoing oppression and marginalization. We believe in the right to our own liberation, unbounded by man-made borders, white supremacy, and misogyny.” For the past ten years, Sabogal has consistently reinvented what it means to be a female muralist in a male-dominated medium. She has continuously pushed boundaries as an artist by utilizing her medium for social change, action, and empowerment. Her murals have been commissioned by Facebook, Google, 20th Century Fox, the University of Southern California, the University of California, the University of Arizona, and the University of Utah, among many others. In 2016, Sabogal received KQED’s Women to Watch Award. A year later, she was commissioned by the Amplifier Foundation for the 2017 Women’s March, following which her “Women Are Perfect” campaign gained international attention. Sabogal’s work has been featured in national and international news and media sources including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffpost and the New York Times.

Born 1979, Edmonton, Canada
The spare, gestural paintings of Curtis Talwst Santiago—a Trinidadian-Canadian artist best known for his miniatures housed in jewellery boxes, often credited to his moniker Talwst—depict lush, tropical landscapes and crude self-portraits in pastel, spray paint, charcoal, oil, and watercolour. These works manifest worlds in which the psychic costs of diaspora are made material, offering latitude where personal and historical memory can be reckoned with. The paintings on display here refer to an early childhood memory. In the artist’s words: “It’s the moment that I go to Trinidad for the first time. I’m about seven or eight. The J’ouvert celebration is in full swing, and I’m seeing the clay being applied to my family members’ faces. I remember the way the sun was coming up, shining red on their faces. The moment felt electric, it felt illuminated. In my mind, their faces were like these red light bulbs. It was the first time I had made the connection that ‘I am from these people.’”

Born 1983, Lahore, Pakistan
Salman Toor received his MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009. Toor’s works have ranged in style from meticulously executed nineteenthcentury-style history painting to loosely painted and abstracted figuration employing design elements and visual language from both Eastern and Western pop culture. Toor’s brushstrokes place young, queer, brown men in scenes of love, friendship, and solitude in luscious oil paintings. In his work, he challenges the systematic exclusion from art history of queer men of colour. Beauty, vulnerability, and power shine through each painting. Into his depictions of intricate scenarios and intimate encounters, the artist weaves elements from both the Pakistani and American (specifically New York City) cultures. Toor has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and Pakistan, and has been featured, as artist and as writer, in publications such as ArtAsiaPacific, Wall Street International, the Express Tribune, and the Friday Times.

Born 1980, Canada
Hajra Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice ranges from painting and drawing to video, sound, sculpture and installation. Amongst other issues, she explores the nexus between security, surveillance and the covert networks of power that structure lives, while also addressing the traumas and alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and state violence. Characterized by a distinct visual language and unique poetic approach, her works use the ordinary as a means to convey the profound, and landscape as a medium to transpose human struggle and a radical politics of resistance and resilience.

Born 1976, Seoul, South Korea
Jinny Yu’s practice is an inquiry into the medium of painting as a means for seeking to understand the world around us. Her work, which was presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, addresses themes of migration that resonate with larger, global political concerns. Yu works simultaneously to scrutinize conventions and explore new possibilities within the medium of painting, oscillating between the fields of abstraction and the object. Her work has been shown widely, with exhibitions in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Born 1971, Camden, USA
Mickalene Thomas makes paintings, collages, photography, video and installations that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty and power. Blurring the distinction between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, Thomas constructs complex portraits, landscapes, and interiors in order to examine how identity, gender and a sense of self are informed by the ways women (and “feminine” spaces) are represented in art and popular culture.