2011-2012 Programming

WIAprojects 2011-2012

(Programming & research presentations at the Jackman Humanities Auditorium, CWSE/OISE/UT, and UTSC)

2011-2012 Curator-in-Residence: Sevan Injejikian

Project Focus: Locations/Dislocations.
The experience of dislocation prompts insight into how people and ideas inhabit space, and what happens as they move. Many experiences of uprooting and exile are unwelcome; arrivals in new locations often generate violence and intolerance. The arts and books, languages and stories are vital in creating diasporic or hybrid cultures of memory and need. The task is to critically engage these complex practices of memory, importation, colonization, and assimilation. As feminists, this practice is embedded in our experiences and our various practices. Artists and researchers this year will be coming from the USA, Pakistan and Canada and programming will be  happening at two campus sites at UTSC and CWSE, OISE/U of T. Connections, intersections and differences in these programs and people include gender, race, culture and media dealing with cultural genocide, women and cancer, gender/trans issues, and more.

Jackman Visitor Series:

Border Crossings: An “Erotic” Affair?

The artists Sylvat Aziz, and Meral Pasha(Ontario) live cross border from Mesma Belsare (Boston). In complex ways, they interweave gender, sexuality and artistic practice as they confront how dislocation, and their longing for relocation, is mapped on their bodies: for Belsare it is the dynamics of gender in dance, for Aziz a cultural critique, and for Pasha the complexities around gender displacement, and cultural loss. This project intends to bring Belsare, Aziz, and Pasha to present in fall and spring at the St. George and Scarborough campuses of the University of Toronto. This series gives both university sites ongoing engagement with issues of location/dislocation. University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) participating faculty plan to use this in a variety of ways for curricular support, and the Centre for Women‘s Studies (CWSE) and WIAprojects at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/UT at St. George campus will take advantage of Aziz and Pasha to highlight fall, winter and spring programming. A year-end summery of this series will be as a Locations/Dislocations Roundtable on April 10th at 12 noon in Room 2-225 at the CWSE OISE.

Special thanks to the Jackman Humanities Institute and Cultural Pluralism and the Arts for funding and to both and CWSE for programming co-production.

All events are free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.

Sept 26, 2011, 7pm

Jackman Humanities Auditorium, (CWSE & WIAprojects)

7pm (CWSE, WIAprojects and Jackman Humanities Institute)

 University of Toronto Assistant Professor Dina Georgis will provide a focus for a discussion on gender, sexuality, belonging and place, paying particular attention to the transgressive female figures of Leila Khaled and Oum Kalthoum. 

Dina Georgis is an Assistant Professor at Women and Gender Studies Institute and nominally appointed to Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She writes on postcolonial, diasporic and queer cultures. Her work draws on theories of trauma, affect and mourning to think through how narrative and art articulate the affective residues of history and provide the conditions for re-imagining political futures.  Her book, The better story: Lessons from postcolonial monsters and queer affects (under review with SUNY Press), is a conversation among postcolonial studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis. With a focus on the Middle East, it considers the dynamics of political conflict, the histories and subjectivities they produce, and what it means to make an ethical relationship to the terrorized and terrorizing bodies that conflict produces.

Mesma S. Belsare & Sylvat Aziz: In Conversation

Nov 3, 2-4pm. UTSC Humanities & Visual and Performing Arts:

Leigha Lee Browne Theatre, University of Toronto Scarborough.

Mesma S. Belsare is described by the New York Times as ëa tour de force, a true act of transcendence and religious immersion’ and by The Dance Current Magazine as ‘a consummate dancer, as mesmerizing as staring into the heart of a fire’. She is a Boston-based dancer, choreographer, actor, visual artist and educator and belongs to a generation of young dancers in the South Asian Diaspora who have created a unique niche for themselves in the realm of classical Indian arts, while expanding their repertory in the contemporary idiom. She is formally trained in Bharatanatyam (South Indian Classical dance) and Carnatic vocal by Sri Shankar Hombal and Padmashri Geeta Chandran. Mesma’s work is based on concepts of gender, gender-identity and sexuality and the classical tradition of Nayaki Bhava (the voice of the female protagonist) in traditional Bharatanatyam.

Sylvat Aziz holds Masters degrees in literature and in art. Her studies began in Lahore, Pakistan then on to Pratt Institute, New York, and Concordia University, Montreal. She has exhibited sculpture and painting at Venice; Istanbul; Bradford, England; New Delhi and Lahore, as well as many major public and university galleries in Canada. Her research is focused on problems of representation and the politics of space in early Islamic art and architecture and the influences, conflicts and compromises addressed therein. She currently teaches at Queen's University, Department of Art, Kingston, Ontario.

Exhibitions:

Sylvat Aziz : Sisyphus & Other Personal Matters

Curators: Pam Patterson & Emily Kakouris
CWSE, OISE UT

252 Bloor Street West, 2^nd floor hallway

Opening: March 5th 5.30-7pm 
Artist talk: 6pm
Exhibit runs until March 30th.

The work engages with ‘social justice’ questions on how research is conducted in the making of art.  This is especially relevant when digital documenting is employed, which can manipulate information seamlessly and infinitely.  The questions rest primarily on the subaltern dynamics that come into play when roles shift and the subject/object and the ‘researcher’ replace participant/observer research models.   The work questions the privileging that assumes the researcher has the right to display without responsibly acquiring permission. 

Meral Pasha: Liminal Spaces: Inside the Folds of a Map

Guest Curator: Sevan Injejikian

CWSE, OISE UT 252 Bloor Street West, 2^nd floor hallway

Opening: April 2nd 5.30-7pm
Remarks: 6pm
Exhibit runs until April 27th.

Meral Pasha is an emerging Canadian artist whose research into feminist, queer, and post-colonial issues is an ongoing attempt to posit herself in the various stories that surround and inform her. She was raised Muslim in post-colonial Pakistan, received an English-based education, and was already wedged firmly between cultures when she arrived in Canada as a young immigrant. She graduated with a B.F.A. in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University in 2011 and has since been writing, studying Urdu, learning Tabla drumming, and reading colonial history. Her art practice has included video, performance, sculpture, photography, installation and poetry. She recognizes herself as colonized, racialised, queer, gendered and other-ed.

Sevan Injejikian is a photographer, writer and emerging curator. She recently acted as Assistant Curator, Education and Cultural Action at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, where she organized exhibitions and events which engaged in community oriented initiatives. Sevan was also Curatorial Intern at the ACCEA, the Center for Armenian Contemporary Experimental Art in Yerevan, Armenia, and in September 2010, she assisted WIAprojects’ curatorial team in their presentation of Lezli-Rubin Kunda’s book-based performance works. This experience spurred her to develop her curatorial approach and focus on 3^rd wave feminism and queer methodologies. Her interests also include transnationalism and Diaspora Studies, as well as the representation of trauma and conflict memory in contemporary art. Sevan holds a B.A. in Creative Writing with a Minor in Photography from Concordia University, and an M.A. in Art History from McGill University. Her recent writings include “Displacing Home: Moving beyond Nostalgic Identification in Aydin Matlabi’s Work” which will be published in Aydin Matlabi’s forthcoming photographic book on the Iranian social landscape.

Brown Bag Roundtable on The Jackman Series: Border Crossings: An “Erotic” Affair? & WIA 2011-12 theme  Locations/Dislocations 

 April 10^th, 12-1.30pm, Rm- 2-225, CWSE, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, 2^nd floor.

Other WIAprojects 2011-12 Programming

Exhibition:
Gender Archaeology

Students from TDSB

Oct. 3-29th

Opening Oct 3rd, 2011 at CWSE Hallway Gallery

Teacher: Christina Yarmol, WIAprojects Intern & Curatorial Assistant: Irena Radic

Christina Yarmol, Head of Visual Arts, Photography, Graphics, Film and Video at Martingrove Collegiate Institute met and paired with Irena Radic a recent fine arts graduate from York University through the WIAprojects teaching mentoring/internship program.  Through this collaboration the project “Gender Archaeology” was born.  The concept of this project was to get the students thinking about gender and how it relates to work both in and out of the domestic sphere while learning the practical skills of intaglio printmaking.  The students were asked to think about how their own lived-experience and those of their families related to work both inside and outside of home.  They were to represent the types of work performed using an image or images of tools used in that work.  In three panels , they were to represent themselves, and their mothers and fathers or caregivers.  The students were encouraged to examine notions of both traditional and non-traditional gender roles and types of work and how this might guide their own lives and those of their families.  The resulting delicate mages were created on a small scale and show an immense amount of finely detailed  line.  This intimate format draws the viewer into the compositional space and encourages him/her to ask questions about how the tool selections depicted each print.  Delicate Chine collé additions adorn several of the works adding a colorful dimension to these intaglio prints.

Brown Bag Talks:

Curatorial & Educational Collaboration: Eksperimenta!

Date: Wed. Jan 18, 12-1pm

Location: CWSE, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, Rm 2-227

Drs. Joanna Black (U of Manitoba) and Miriam Cooley (U of Alberta) brought digital art created by Canadian high school students to Eksperimenta!, a first of its kind international conference and Triennial Art Exhibition that celebrated secondary school visual art and contemporary art education. This presentation and discussion will focus on women’s collaborative curation, the role of educators, and on  innovation in student work.

Dr. Joanna Black is currently an Associate Professor of Art Education in the Faculty of Education and is cross-appointed as an Associate Professor in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. She teaches visual arts education and new media education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her research interests and published works are on the subjects of the virtual visual arts classroom, new media, visual research methodologies, social issues in art education, and digital visual arts pedagogy. She has previously worked as an art director, curator, museum art educator, art consultant, and K-12 teacher for close to twenty years in public and alternative school settings.

Dr. Miriam Cooley is Associate Professor, Art Education and Associate Chair Undergraduate Education in the Department of Elementary Education, University of Alberta, and President, Canadian Society for Education through Art (CSEA). Her research interests include: Art Education, collaborative research, narrative inquiry, aesthetic creative inquiry processes, and aesthetic response to visual aspects of contemporary culture, video and photo installation and documentary film. Her current work-in-progress addresses the visual aesthetics of creative spaces and the dynamics of creative collaboration and learning. http://www.elementaryed.ualberta.ca/People/AcademicStaff/Miriam%20Cooley.aspx

http://www.eksperimenta.net/eksperimenta/concept/canadian-exposition/

Discussion and Collage Making - The Silent Book: Crafting Memories from a Life with Cancer – Eva C. Karpinski & Pam Patterson

Date Feb 8th, 2012, 12-1.30pm

Location: CWSE, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, Rm 2-227

The Silent Book: Crafting Memories from a Life with Cancer is a visual and textual collaborative autobiography project that addresses several complex and perplexing questions pertaining to living in the postcancer body. Women’s experiences of cancer cut across so many levels of subjective and objective reality that they can only be articulated in a fragmentary manner, through a bricolage of discontinuous narratives and mixed images.  For this session, Patterson & Karpinski will discuss both personal cancer experiences and their associated politics. We invite participants to join us in making collages from found printed text and images. Readings may include: cancer journals; emails from friends and doctors; quotations from famous cancer survivors; citations from the popular scientific and medical lore on cancer; and statistical data. The event will engage multiple, and perhaps contradictory, discourses that construct the intimate and public dimensions of women’s encounters with cancer. We will create a visual archive of personal memories that speak of our bodily experiences, medicalization, pain, and empowerment, as well as our spiritual and intellectual transformations and activism.

Pam Patterson’s (PhD) research, performance and teaching have focused on culture, disability and women and gender studies. She is Associate Scholar , CWSE/OISE and Director, WIA projects and teaches at University of Toronto and OCAD University. As a performance and visual artist she has exhibited and performed internationally.

Eva C. Karpinski (PhD) teaches in the School of Women's Studies at York University. She co-edited a special issue of Canadian Woman Studies on Women and Cancer. Her book Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation is forthcoming in June 2012.