Breathing Room

Martha Glenn Courtesy of HAU

Wednesday, 06 February 2019
6 PM
OR Gallery (555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver)
Free, all welcome

Performance artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis’s research residency at the OR Gallery is part of a constellation of events where artists and guest-speakers think alongside her on themes in performance and gesture. During this time, the OR Gallery will transform into the Breathing Room, a publicly accessible rehearsal space and reading room where Lewis will break from her near-constant touring schedule to view performance archives, respond to texts and develop ideas with visitors including keyon gaskin (Portland, OR), Joshua Chambers-Letson (Northwestern University), Tina Post (University of Chicago), Laura U. Marks (SFU) and Phanuel Antwi (UBC). 

More information about the exhibition can be found here.

As part of this constellation, Amy Kazymerchyk and Lewis will co-host a No Reading salon. Participants will read and discuss excerpts from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “Theorizing in a Void: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” which explores how discourses of chaos theory and physics reach beyond the limits of conceptualization and representation to image the performative, gestural, resonant and metaphoric dimensions of black feminist poetics; and Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, which attends to how mimesis (the practice of imitation) and its proximity to alterity (the opposition of Self and Other) are deeply indebted to colonialism’s ideological constructions.

Texts will be handed out at the salon. No pre-reading or research is required.

Please RSVP to or@orgallery.org

Through her performance practice, Ligia Lewis engages affect, empathy and the sensate, her choreography considers the social implications of the body while evoking its potentiality. In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her work, “minor matter” and the Prix Jardin d’Europe for “Sorrow Swag.”

Amy Kazymerchyk is a curator who has paid particular attention to moving image and time-based practices, with intrigue and care for their encounters with cinema, performance, painting and poetics. From 2013–18 she was the Curator of SFU Galleries’ Audain Gallery. Previously she was the Events and Exhibitions Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. In 2008 she inaugurated DIM Cinema, a monthly series of artists’ moving images at The Cinematheque, which she programmed until 2013.

Productive Doubt

Friday, 24 August 2018
7 PM
The Polygon Gallery (101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver)
Free, all welcome

An open reading salon and conversation in response to Susan Hiller’s exhibition Altered States, currently on view at the Polygon Gallery, hosted by Amy Kazymerchyk and cheyanne turions as part of No Reading After the Internet, a roaming series that encourages collective discovery through the sharing of ideas.

This group reading and discussion will focus on writing selected by Susan Hiller that relates to her interest in creative processes and art-making as being motivated by uncertainty, mystery and doubt. We will discuss philosophies of “negative capability,” a concept introduced in 1817 by the Romantic poet John Keats that cultivates empathy by questioning singular truths. We will also read selections of Hiller’s own writing, and explore links to works in the exhibition. Texts will be provided, no pre-reading required.

Amy Kazymerchyk is the Curator of the Audain Gallery, part of SFU Galleries. Her curatorial commitments have focused on moving-image practices in dialogue with the formal and conceptual spaces and histories of the cinema, black box and art gallery. From 2010 to 2013 she was the Events and Exhibitions Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre and the Programmer of the Signal and Noise Media Arts Festival. In 2008 she inaugurated DIM Cinema, a monthly evening of artists’ moving images at the Cinematheque, which she programmed until 2014.

cheyanne turions is an independent writer and curator concerned with art’s capacity to provoke otherwise possibilities. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include projects with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Audain Gallery (Vancouver), Gallery TPW (Toronto), Mercer Union (Toronto) and SBC galerie d’art contemporain (Montréal). She has published widely, including with Afterall, the Banff Centre, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Hyperallergic and the Vera List Center. In 2017, she participated in documenta 14. She is currently the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and sits on the board of directors for 221A.

 

No Person’s Land

Thursday, 15 February 2018
6 PM
The Showroom (63 Penfold Street, Marylebone, London UK)
Free, all welcome

As part of No Person’s Land, a residency project coordinated by DAM Projects, this salon will be facilitated by Seecum Cheung, Amanprit Sandhu and cheyanne turions. No Person’s Land uses joint research to enact how alternative structures might be formed between peers based on shared commitments and support; mapping a terrain between practice, thinking and being. In this spirit, this iteration of No Reading features three texts, chosen collaboratively, that explicitly frame the power relations and social assumptions that otherwise invisibly structure cultural work. Excerpts will be drawn from the following texts: WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier (2017), which dissects the language of settler occupation through prose poetry; Saving Solidarity: Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World by Rafia Zakaria (2016), which addresses two audiences directly—western feminists and feminists in the global south in essayistic form; and The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich (1985), which chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines of the Second World War, stories that have remained absent from official narratives.

Excerpts will be handed out at the salon and no pre-reading is required.

Seecum Cheung is a visual artist based between London and Rotterdam. Working primarily with moving images, her current work is an ongoing series of films based upon interviews and encounters with leading specialists in the field of right-wing radicalism, human rights organizations and activist refugee groups. Her films include coverage of the 2017 Dutch elections (The Dutch Window, 2017) with writer, musician, broadcaster and curator Morgan Quaintance, and extensive interviews on the rise of the far-right in Germany with political journalist Richard Cooke with SBS Public Broadcasters (Interview with Lennart, 2016). Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Syndkt Gallery, Brussels, and Grand Union, Birmingham (both 2017). She is a recipient of the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award 2015/16.

Amanprit Sandhu is an independent curator based in London. She is a co-founder of DAM PROJECTS, a curatorial collective founded with Daniella Rose King and Morgan Quaintance in 2014. The collective use temporary exhibitions and events to support emerging, underexposed and unorthodox artists, art scenes, discourses and debates. She currently sits on the board of Arts Catalyst.

cheyanne turions is a curator, cultural worker and writer currently based in Canada. From the farmlands of Treaty 8, she is of settler and Indigenous ancestry. Her work positions exhibitions and criticism as social gestures, where she responds to artistic practices by linking aesthetics and politics through discourse. Since 2008, she has been the director of No Reading After the Internet (with Amy Kazymerchyk and Alex Muir). She is a founding member of EMILIA–AMALIA, an exploratory working group that employs practices of citation, annotation, and autobiography as modes of activating feminist praxis. Currently, turions is the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery and on the Board of Directors at 221A.

Every sound is a small action and broke world

Monday, 12 December 2016
6 PM
8-11 (233 Spadina Avenue)
Free

As part of Every sound is a small action and broke world, an exhibition by Christopher Willes currently on view at 8-11, this salon keeps with an inquiry into the various genealogies of sound that the exhibition elaborates and will feature texts by experimental music icons Maryanne Amacher and Pauline Oliveros.

Christopher Willes in attendance.

Every sound is a small action and broke world explores a sensorial delineation between the intra-noise of political conflict and music’s capacity to make something else audible. Borrowing its title from a line in the poem “Other dimensions in music, ghostcatching,” by Fred Moten, actions in the exhibition initiate from the forcefulness of sound—its vibrational persistence, and its material in-betweenness in relation to objects, the body, space and language. Informed by the compositional language of American experimental music, the exhibition includes several long-duration sound works that complicate attention, material memory and the concert as a mode of display.

Readings have been selected in consultation with artist Christopher Willes.

In a 2001 presentation as part of a panel on John Cage’s influence—which will be read aloud at the salon—Maryanne Amacher meditates on the future of music. More specifically, she writes about the possibility that the conditions of reception will become more a part of the music maker’s concern: “Music will be filled with extraordinary surprises … Music can tell us about the sensation of thinking.” For Amacher, and those who follow after her significant impact on experimental music practices, Cage’s effect was to open up not only a question of what is music, but how are we listening. In her visionary futurist tone, she speaks about the origins of music, its effect on the brain and cognitive approaches to composition that open new possibilities to experiencing music over long durations and through surprising sensations. She explains, “Expansive memory will allow composers to create sonic worlds that may last many hours yet include long periods of silence … Music will now take on a totally new dimension, similar to our experiences of time.”

Alongside this reading, the salon will also feature a collective enactment of one of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations. Oliveros had abandoned composition/performance practice as it is usually established for what she termed Sonic Explorations, which included everyone who wanted to participate. She attempted to erase the subject/object or performer/audience relationship by returning to ancient forms that preclude spectators. She was interested in communication among all forms of life, through Sonic Energy. She was especially interested in the healing power of Sonic Energy and its transmission within groups. All societies admit the power of music or sound. Sonic Meditations are an attempt to return the control of sound to the individual alone and within groups especially for humanitarian purposes—specifically healing.

Excerpts will be handed out at the salon and no pre-reading is required.

Every sound is a small action and broke world is on view until 03 January 2017 at 8-11.

Special thanks to the 8-11 for hosting this salon.

CHRISTOPHER WILLES is a Canadian artist and composer. He makes performances, music and exhibitions, and he writes about contemporary art. Select projects have been presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Music Gallery, Intersite Visual Art Festival, The Rhubarb Festival and Open Ears Festival. He often works within experimental dance and theatre as a sound maker and dramaturge, including works with Public Recordings, Urbanvessel, Small Wooden Shoe, Dancemakers, Ellen Furey, Ame Henderson, Evan Webber and Adam Kinner. He studied music at the University of Toronto and received an MFA from Bard College. In 2016 he was awarded a Chalmers Art Fellowship and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Common Aliens: Diaspora in Time

Saturday, 03 December 2016
Studio XX (4001 rue Berri, espace 201, Montréal)
11:30 AM
Free

Organized by Atelier Céladon, common aliens: diaspora in time | étrangers communs: La disapora dans le temps is a curatorial project organized to work through the feeling of being in time in an unmappable terrain of bodies. In prioritizing the voices of Indigenous and people of colour, Atelier Céladon has assembled a program that centers the knowledge gained through lived temporalities in the practical effort to build up our networks of solidarity. Think what it can mean to prioritize occupying time over space, to find our portals in between time through glass bowls. Our bodies speak to each other. They sound the depths together, recognizing that there is no desire that is not collective and no desire that does not create.

No Reading After the Internet is excited to be part of the weekend’s programming and co-director cheyanne turions will host a salon that considers the ways identity is inhabited and deployed in the creation and contextualization of artworks. Together, we will read Hannah Black’s essay “The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic,” which was published in the Summer 2016 issue of Artforum, and Richard Hill’s essay “Is There an Indigenous Way to Write About Indigenous Art?,” which was published online by Canadian Art on 25 May 2016.

Texts will be handed out at the salon and no pre-reading is required.

Image courtesy of Atelier Celadon.

Working Conditions

Juan Ortiz-Apuy, “Measures of Distance II (North, South, East and West) (After Heizer),” 2014.

Tuesday, 02 August 2016
Gallery TPW (170 St. Helens Avenue)
7 PM
Free

As part of Working Conditions, an exhibition currently on view at Gallery TPW, this salon will expand upon the exhibition’s interrogation of power dynamics, blind spots and measures of success contained in cultural economies and ecosystems, investigating the invisible structures that are used to organize time, bodies and space.

Working Conditions brings together the work of artists questioning where they stand and what they stand amidst. Acknowledging that the studio exists at the intersection of many ecologies, the artists place themselves in relation to factors beyond their place of production. Their interactions negotiate complicities, rights and responsibilities while pushing at the blurry boundaries between art and life.

Readings have been selected in consultation with participating artists Kajsa Dahlberg and Juan Ortiz-Apuy, and curator Sam Cotter, and will include selections from Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Excerpts will be handed out at the salon and no pre-reading is required.

Working Conditions is on view until 06 August 2016 at Gallery TPW.

Special thanks to the Gallery TPW for hosting this salon.

The Origin of the Work of Art

Saturday, 30 April 2016
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
2 PM
Free

As part of Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, which is curated by Emelie Chhangur, this salon is hosted by Kevin Temple and Michael Maranda, who invite a collective reading of Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” in the context of object oriented ontology and Gertrude Stein’s Objects Lie on a Table. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger confronts the history of aesthetics for uncritically accepting the distinction between subjects and the objects of art. Heidegger, by contrast, locates aesthetic experience beneath the threshold of the subject/object distinction to uncover the ontology of the work of art.

Kevin Temple is a writer and critic. He is currently a PhD candidate in philosophy at The New School for Social Research, New York.

Michael Maranda is a Toronto-based artist and assistant curator at the AGYU.

Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table is on view until April 30 at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Image credit: Diane Borsato, Tea Service (the conservators will wash the dishes), 2013. Museum action/intervention and archival photographs. Courtesy of the artist.

Special thanks to the Art Museum at the University of Toronto for hosting this salon and to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of this project.

Reading Alice Driver and Susan Buck-Morss as selected by Joni Murphy

Still from “Céline et Julie vont en bateau” (1974), directed by Jacques Rivette.

Saturday, 23 April 2016
Art Metropole
4 PM
Free

Reflecting on themes emerging from her debut novel Double Teenage, which has just been published by BookThug, this salon will feature texts selected by Joni Murphy that have been instrumental in the development of her work.

Joni Murphy in attendance.

Exploring  ongoing patterns of violence against women (especially Indigenous women and women of colour) in relation to NAFTA and neoliberalism, Murphy investigates the matrix of violence wrought by western philosophical, economic, and cultural traditions. Excerpts will be drawn from Alice Driver’s “Why Targeted Violence Against Women in Juárez Is Not A Myth” and Susan Buck-Morss’s “The Flaneur, The Sandwichman and the Whore.”

Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media’s obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Double Teenage is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now, offering a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.

Participants are invited to attend a reading by Joni Murphy on Thursday, 21 April 21 2016 at BookThug’s Spring 2016 book launch featuring readings by Jacob Wren, Malcolm Sutton, Joni Murphy, Margaret Christakos, Adrienne Gruber, Jennifer Zilm, François Turcot, Stephen Thomas and Alessandro Porco. Details can be found here.

Joni Murphy is a writer and artist working between critical theory and fiction, writing, performance and sound. The quotidian workings of state violence, literary misprision, and subtle forms of resistance to neoliberalism are consistent themes in her varied creative output. Visit her website here.

Special thanks to Art Metropole for hosting this salon and to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of this project.

Walter Scott’s “Sequel to Guts”

Thursday, 21 April 2016
Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough
7 PM
Free

This special edition of No Reading After the Internet will feature a new performance work by Walter Scott presented at the exhibition opening of How a Living Day is Made.

Sequel to Guts is a collage of new and existing writing, reconfigured to create original associations between the fictions and reality of the artist, the audience and the gallery environment. Against the backdrop of a new, site-specific mural, Scott will animate the forms and narratives of the drawing: as the written words are performed over the changing backgrounds, they will create associations with the images encountered along the way.

Curated by cheyanne turions, How a Living Day is Made is an exhibition about survival strategies that features the work of Aisha Sasha John, Rachelle Sawatsky and Walter Scott. Their practices open up places of affect, empathy and entanglement, staking a claim for the vibrancy of being recovered from the banal, systemic or heroic struggles of making a life in the world today.

Walter Scott is an interdisciplinary artist working across writing, illustration, performance and sculpture. In 2011, while living in Montreal, he began a comic book series, Wendy, exploring the narrative of a fictional young woman living in an urban centre who aspires to global success and art stardom but whose dreams are perpetually derailed. The position of the outsider and shape shifter are central to this body of work and the influence of feminist icons such as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde and artist, punk poet, experimental novelist and filmmaker Kathy Acker lingers. Recent exhibitions include Fictive Communities, Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama, Japan 2014; Pre-Existing Work, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver 2015; and Stopping the Sun in Its Course, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles 2015.

This special edition of No Reading After the Internet is presented as part of the exhibition How a Living Day is Made, which is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.

Special thanks to the Doris McCarthy Gallery for hosting this performance and to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of this project.

Braiding Theory

Tuesday, 19 January 2016
Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (1455 boul. de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montréal)
7 PM
Free

As part of the Reading Exercises exhibition curated by Katrie Chagnon, the three founding members of No Reading After the Internet—Amy Kazymerchyk, Alex Muir and cheyanne turions—will lead a special salon that departs from the #ReadTheTRCReport project entitled Braiding Theory. Braiding Theory is a pedagogical framework coined by Lakota artist Dana Claxton that exercises attention and care in reading, interpretation and synthesis.

Excerpts will be drawn from Erica Violet Lee’s “‘Indigenizing the Academy’ without Indigenous people: who can teach our stories?” published on her website Moontime Warrior, Val Napoleon’s “Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders” published by the National Centre for First Nations Governance and Zoe Todd’s “Rethinking Aesthetics and Ontology through Indigenous Law: On the work of Val Napoleon and Loretta Todd” published by C Magazine.

Erica Violet Lee is a Cree undergraduate student of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. She is an Indigenous feminist, and writes at moontimewarrior.com. Since speaking at the first Idle No More teach-in in 2012, Erica has been recognized as an international youth leader with the movement.

Val Napoleon is the Law Foundation Professor of Aboriginal Justice and Governance at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. She is from north east British Columbia (Treaty 8) and a member of Saulteau First Nation. She is also an adopted member of the Gitanyow (Gitksan) House of Luuxhon, Ganada (Frog) Clan. Val worked as a community activist and consultant in northwestern BC for over 25 years, specializing in health, education, and justice issues. Her dissertation on Gitksan law and legal theory was awarded the UVIC Governor General’s Gold Medal for best dissertation in 2009.Val’s current research focuses on indigenous legal traditions, indigenous legal theory, indigenous feminism, citizenship, self-determination, and governance.

Zoe Todd (Métis) is from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) in the Treaty Six Area of Alberta, Canada. She writes about Indigeneity, art, architecture, decolonization and healing in urban contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in northern Canada. Her art practice incorporates writing, spoken word, beading, drawing and film to tell stories about being Métis in the Prairies. She is a lecturer in Anthropology at Carleton University, a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and she was a 2011 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar.

Braiding Theory at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery. Photo credit: Jean-Louis René.