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.

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.

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.

 

Reading Exercises

Image taken from “Honouring the Truth,Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.”

Reading Exercises
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (1455 boul. de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montréal)
19 November 2015–23 January 2016
Tuesday–Friday: 12:00-18:00
Saturday: 12:00-17:00

Curated by Katrie Chagnon
Featuring Fiona Banner, Simon Bertrand, Clayton Cubitt, Ricardo Cuevas, Brendan Fernandes, Gary Hill, Bouchra Khalili, Ève K. Tremblay, Nicoline van Harskamp and #ReadTheTRCReport, an initiative by Erica Violet Lee, Joseph Murdoch-Flowers, and Zoe Todd, presented in collaboration with No Reading After the Internet, a project by Amy Kazymerchyk, Alexander Muir, and cheyanne turions

This winter, in collaboration with #ReadTheTRCReport, No Reading After the Internet will be participating in Reading Exercises, an exhibition organized by Katrie Chagnon at Montréal’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Whereas No Reading would usually work with an artist to read aloud and discuss texts that had informed their practice, here, instead, we took the opportunity of the exhibition to put No Reading in dialogue with another project that is also concerned with the embodied politic of reading aloud.

#ReadTheTRCReport is a citizen’s initiative generated by Zoe Todd, Erica Violet Lee and Joseph Murdoch-Flowers. This project was developed as a means of making the entire Executive Summary of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada available online in video format. The report acts as a testament to the “cultural genocide”¹ perpetrated by the Canadian state and Canadians upon Indigenous communities, notably by means of the residential school system. The document is meant to shed light on our complex collective history and “to lay the foundation for the important question of reconciliation.”²

In reaction to the publication of the report in June 2015, Métis activist, writer and teacher Chelsea Vowel, launched a call on her blog, âpihtawikosisân, for people to read the document in order to educate themselves on the permanent damages caused by Canada’s colonial history and to critically engage with the TRC’s findings. The video reading project initiated by Todd, Lee and Murdoch-Flowers, serves as a direct response to Vowel’s call, as well as a means to increase the report’s accessibility, to grant it life and to honour residential school survivors. Using social media (Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, et cetera), the trio has invited individuals from throughout Canada and elsewhere (Indigenous and non-Indigenous), to record themselves reading through one of 140 sections of the report, and to share their videos on YouTube. Accessible by searching #ReadTheTRCReport, the videos are integrated within a playlist containing the complete English version of the document.

A productive political exercise, this project is rooted within the current Canadian understanding of the existing relations with Indigenous communities. It testifies to the possibility—or rather the necessity—for each of us to exercise agency through the act of reading.  

The dialogue between these two projects will be presented through a series of public readings and discussions that examine the process, structure and form of the report, histories of oral and textual testimony, and the role of literacy in political engagement, scheduled to take place in January 2016.

Within this context, No Reading and #ReadTheTRCReport will think out-loud and collectively about the politics of reading aloud, of political action more generally, and will consider what our projects can learn from each other. Visitors will be invited to contribute to the production of the yet to be undertaken French video edition of the #ReadTheTRCReport.

The exhibition opens on 18 November 2015, and we hope to see you in January, when folks from both projects gather together in Montréal to think + talk + celebrate + share.

1. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, 1. Online : http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=890 (accessed October 29, 2015)

2. Ibid., VI.

witness / témoin nichola feldman-kiss

nichola feldman-kiss, “after Africa \ a yard of ashes,” 2011-2012.

Friday, 23 October 2015
Ottawa Art Gallery (Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa)
7 PM
Free

Reflecting on the recurrent themes emerging in her survey exhibition witness, which is currently on display at the Ottawa Art Gallery, this salon will feature texts selected by nichola feldman-kiss that have contextually informed the works in the exhibition.

Excerpts will be drawn from Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty, whose reflections on brutal honesty position cruelty as a careful force, and William Steig’s Rotten Island, which the artist credits (among a few others) for teaching her to read out loud.

witness is a comprehensive survey that celebrates the last 15 years of the Toronto-based artist’s creative practice. A powerful examination of the living postcolonial body, this provocative collection of installations entangles the personal and the political to understand how the body becomes in relation to discourses of Otherness. Through a self-conscious autobiographical lens, feldman-kiss explores her own body and psyche as political sites of resistance through which to complicate the aesthetics and interpretations of self-portraiture. The works in witness tell the stories of cultural, experiential and historical conflict. Asking us to turn our gaze outwards, the most recent works in this exhibition offers witness to Sudanese conflict specifically, and more generally provides evidence of global exploitation and oppression. Throughout witness, the works pose the body as an offering to bridge the chasm between us and them, reflecting on the means of traversing between here and there.

nichola feldman-kiss is a Canadian, German, Jamaican artist exploring relational interpretations of body and embodiment, identity and autobiography, witness and traumatic memory. Visit her website here.

Special thanks to the Ottawa Art Gallery for hosting this salon.

Eating Bodies: Towards a Consummate Consumption

No Reading After the Internet is excited to be co-presenting the summer session of SCHOOL, an ongoing series of informal school-type seminars for people of any and all educational backgrounds organized by Jonathan Adjemian and Xenia Benivolski.

Eating Bodies: Towards a Consummate Consumption will be facilitated by Leila Timmins and cheyanne turions.

Readings will be sent out in advance of each session by email. We invite all styles of engagement with the texts—mastery is not expected, desired nor possible. Those interested are strongly encouraged to attend all four sessions if possible, but drop-ins are welcome too.

PWYC donations taken after each session, all of which go to thank the facilitators for their time.

If you are planning to attend, please email quoteschool@gmail.com to ensure that you get readings and notifications. All are welcome.

What else is food, beyond nourishment? This summer session of SCHOOL will focus on the social and aesthetic aspects of food, where eating is considered as act with repercussions beyond the fulfillment of a basic need. Drawing on texts that operate outside of the sentimentality and machismo pervasive in much food writing, taste will be explored as something conditioned by class, gender, culture and history. Born of a desire to indulge and critically interrogate our tastes, especially as they resonate outward from our own plates, we hope to use food as symbol for human relations, exploring patterns of interaction between and within societies.

Over the course of four weeks, we will read a variety of texts—theoretical and comedic, historical and contemporary, fiction and not. Approaching SCHOOL as an experiment in informal education, please note that we are not experts in these texts, though our curiosity is voracious. Understandings of the texts will be performed collectively, and in addition to generally discussing each week’s theme, participants will be asked to share selections from the texts they find incendiary or spot-on. These observations will be used to guide our conversations.

Colonial Foodstuffs

12 July 2015, 4 PM

MOCCA (952 Queen Street West)

with guest Jonah Campbell

Reading Jonah Campbell’s “Notes Preliminary to Actually Thinking About an Anti-Colonial Food Writing” from Still Crapulent and Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s “‘She Made the Table a Snare to Them’: Sylvester Graham’s Imperial Dietics” from Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Session one, “Colonial Foodstuffs,” hosted within Dean Baldwin’s “Queen West Yacht Club.” Photo documentation by Xenia Benivolski.

SESSION ONE, “COLONIAL FOODSTUFFS,” HOSTED WITHIN DEAN BALDWIN’S “QUEEN WEST YACHT CLUB.” PHOTO DOCUMENTATION BY Brett Despotovich.

Gluttony

19 July 2015, 4 PM

8-11 (233 Spadina Avenue)

Reading Kingsley Amis’s “The Hangover” from Everyday Drinking; M.F.K. Fisher’s “G is for Gluttony” from An Alphabet for Gourmets and “How to be Cheerful Through Starving” from How to Cook a Wolf; and Walter Benjamin’s “Fresh Figs” from his Selected Writings: Part 1 1927-1930.

Session two, “Gluttony,” hosted in 8-11’s backyard. Photo documentation by Gabby Moser.

Session two, “Gluttony,” hosted in 8-11’s backyard. Photo documentation by Leila Timmins.

Cannibalistic Feminisms

26 July 2015, 4 PM

MOCCA (952 Queen Street West)

Reading Jonah Campbell’s “On Nigella Lawson, Impossible Witnessing, and the Reification of Analysis” from Still Crapulent; excerpts from F.T. Marinetti/Fillia’s The Futurist Cookbook; and excerpts from Three Banquets for a Queen, edited by Charlotte Birnbaum; as well as watching Candice Lin’s Tales from the Kitchen: Beggar’s Revenge Chicken.

Impromptu post-salon BBQ of frog legs and celery, courtesy of Dean Baldwin. Photo documentation by Leila Timmins.

Art-food and Taste-making

02 August 2015, 4 PM

8-11 (233 Spadina Avenue)

with guest Danielle St-Amour

Reading Martha Rosler’s The Art of Cooking: A Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, Helen Rosner’s “Christina Tosi Climbs to the Top of Cool Girl Mountain With ‘Milk Bar Life’” from Eater, Carolyn Korsmeyer’s “The Meaning of Taste and the Taste of Meaning” from Making Sense of Taste and Carol Goodden’s “FOOD and the City” from Collapse VII.

Drinking onion wine in 8-11’s backyard. Photo documentation by Xenia Benivolski .

**

LEILA TIMMINS is a writer and curator based in Toronto. She is the Head of Exhibitions at Gallery 44 and currently sits on the Board of C Magazine and the Education Programming Committee at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

CHEYANNE TURIONS is an independent, Toronto-based curator and writer. She sits on the Board of Directors for Kunstverein Toronto, the Editorial Advisory Committee for C Magazine and the Advisory Board for the newly federated institution comprising the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and University of Toronto Art Centre. She is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto).

Thanks to MOCCA and 8-11 for their support of this session of SCHOOL and thanks also to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto).

Mia Feuer’s “Synthetic Seasons” at the Esker Foundation

Mia Feuer’s “Boreal,” 2013 (detail). Photo: Sue Wrbican.

Tuesday, 23 June 2015
Esker Foundation
444-1011 9 Ave SE, Calgary
6:30 PM
Free, but advance registration is suggested.

Facilitated by cheyanne turions.

Departing from the possible futures of oil production and consumption that are invoked in Mia Feuer’s solo exhibition at the Esker Foundation, Synthetic Seasons, the artist has compiled selections from articles and essays that have been instrumental in developing the project. The salon will feature excerpts from Lucy Lippard’s Undermining and Esther Leslie’s Synthetic Worlds.

Feuer is interested in the post-natural landscape, visible sites where human interaction—be it personal, social, political, or financial—has altered or is in the process of rapidly changing the land, and thus our relationship to it. Her work makes connections between our intense material dependency and the accelerated environmental impact this creates. Collapsed Soviet coalmines find common ground with bombed out buildings in the Suez Canal; trees feathered and tarred in the Athabasca Oil Sands sail alongside crystal blue glacial tongues of the Arctic Circle. Synthetic chandeliers of industrial waste mix and float among the black wings of ravens, a sky that pours down stinking pitch, an inky rink at the end of the world. Feuer stands at the centre of the storm, creating brilliant and ambitious work that calls attention to these damaged sites, but also surprisingly finds beauty and hope amidst the crushing mess.

Born in Winnipeg, Mia Feuer received a BFA from the University of Winnipeg in 2004 and an MFA in 2009 from the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. The artist currently lives and works in Oakland where she is Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the California College of the Arts.

Special thanks to the Esker Foundation for hosting this salon.

Theorizing the Spoken Word

This rumination on the relation between text and voice is excerpted from Chus Pato’s Secession (2009), from the chapter entitled “This I Folds and Unfolds Until a Last Fold Which is a Dream,” as translated by Erín Moure.

Writing evokes, evokes the voice that in humans is that of an animal that learned language, various languages, all of them articulated. As for the voice (to read aloud, present a poem), nothing brings it closer to the text; a text is complete in its writing, and writing is an absence, a forgetting. This dismemory (the forgetting of winter, of the bird snare, of angels running when they meet the gaze) of the voice that speaks or reads the poem is what makes writing possible. These are letters, the rough draft; but precisely for this reason, because this base is where letters emerge, writing is the sole possibility of remembering the voice, the voice that in humans is the voice of an animal that learns interminable ABC that calls out constantly through the voice, through the lost moment in which someone articulates a voice in speech. Afterward, a silence exists to speak the world, then all speak, then time and history and grammar arrive.