A Toronto art gallery is showcasing an art exhibition by three Black women exploring the politics of Black place-making.
The Next Contemporary, located on 1655 Dupont Street, presents THAT WHICH WE WERE GIVEN. The exhibit opened May 6 and will run until July 1.
This group exhibition uses fine art photograph archives and visual materials by way of somatic and semiotic expression to examine the politics of Black place-making.
THAT WHICH WE WERE GIVEN also helps viewers explore the concept of self as the place of belonging and to rethink cultural expressions through the visual memories of Blackness.
Every featured Black-woman artist uses “visual histories to explore the ongoing processes of displacement and dispossession so prevalent among Black communities, visualizing what is often a precarious and tenuous relationship with place – both ‘back home’ and the lands on which one remakes home,” according to the gallery’s release.
Anique Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance and often employs the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives to create, what she calls, impossible images.
She has lectured as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University, in institutions across America and in 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist whose work shapeshift and transform to reveal a glimpse into new ways of seeing and understanding Blackness through installation and lens-based media.
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Nnebe’s work is also rooted in Black feminist standpoint theory and has given presentations at universities across Quebec, including Laval, McGill and Concordia and facilitated workshops at the National Gallery of Canada and the Ottawa Art Gallery.
Mallory Lowe Mpoka is a Cameroonian Belgian visual artist who works between Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) and Douala. Her recent investigations question the notion of home as an (in)tangible place and the concept of migration through diasporic, transoceanic and post-colonial realities, using analog photographic processes, screen printing, embroidery and natural textile dyeing.
Mpoka is the co-winner of the Malick Sidibé prize by the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography, and the winner of the Royal Bank of Canada Future Launch Scholar-ship 2023.
Curator of THAT WHICH WE WERE GIVEN, owner and gallery director of The Next Contemporary, Farnoosh Talaee, believes it’s imperative space is created for stories of displacement through generations of migration and are told by BIPOC people in Toronto.
“My approach to most of the exhibitions I’m curating for The Next Contemporary is giving back to the community and my approach is absolutely educational. The whole approach is laying on educating different communities but specifically and mainly the BIPOC community but also the other people that they need to be educated about BIPOC communities,” she told Now Toronto on Wednesday.
As an Iranian immigrant, who moved to Toronto to join her family in 2017 from Dubai, Talaee understands first-hand the importance of sharing lived experiences to aid in the communal acceptance of one another in Canada.
“I think genuinely people really need education. So I can see racism and classism and everything here in Toronto, in Canada, but when I’m getting into conversation with people, some parts of what we feel right now is coming from lack of education, and lack of knowledge, lack of understanding of history,” Talaee continued.
“Some people call those audiences that are not knowledgeable enough lazy and they don’t want to do the labor for them, but I feel like if you really want to restructure something that you feel is wrong, that you have to be part of this structure. So I rather do that labor and educate the audience so for the next generation, life will be easier, because the audience will know better.”
