Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) is a not-for-profit project space, publisher, and professional network devoted to the support and advancement of curatorial inquiry and practices in Toronto, Canada, and beyond.

With a focus on critically-engaged, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary curatorial practices, experimental and underrepresented perspectives and approaches, and wider public outreach and education on curating and exhibition-making, Critical Distance is an open platform for diverse curatorial perspectives, and a forum for ideas on curating as a way to foster meaningful connections across cultures, disciplines, geographies, and generations.

Providing a venue and context for curators in all stages of professional development, our exhibition program is designed to stimulate curiosity, conversation, and critical thinking on contemporary culture and the practice of curating through the lenses of collecting, organizing, displaying, experiencing, communicating, and connecting — all within a critical framework.

Through our publishing program, exhibitions are fully documented in a professionally designed catalogue with critical writing—a benefit to the artists and curators whose work is published, as well as to audiences who receive reader-friendly context on the work and exhibition. Catalogues further extend the otherwise limited duration of the exhibition, both across time and through physical and digital space.

Through inclusive and varied educational programs including talks, workshops, performances, incubators, residencies, and more, we facility opportunities for co-learning in ways that enrich the exhibition experience and encourage active participation in curatorial conversations.

Fostering new ideas and connections between people, objects, ideas, institutions, and environments, has always been central to our mission — for curators, of course, but also for colleagues, artists, presenting partners, and our diverse publics — to make a case for the roles, responsibilities, value, and necessity of the critical curatorial position.

Far beyond mere selection or pretensions to connoisseurship, and transcending conventional assumptions of curating’s role as primarily interpretive or administrative, we seek to recuperate and reimagine curating as the care-full balancing of the practical and the poetic to manifest new socio-cultural potentials within the transformative space of the curatorial encounter. At Critical Distance, we believe that curators, artists, and audiences alike should be afforded equal consideration and care, as there is no exhibition without each other.

Critical Distance
Suite 122
401 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
Canada
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We are on the first floor at 401 Richmond, down the hall from Tangled Art + Disability just before the open area called Urbanspace Gallery, and around the corner from Trinity Square Video.

Critical Distance is committed to advancing the conversation on accessibility as a critical curatorial practice. In presenting our programs, we prioritize the development and integration of access measures in collaboration with guest curators, artists, partners, and publics, especially from within Deaf and disabled communities.

We are located in Suite 122 on the ground floor at 401 Richmond Street West, a wheelchair accessible building with ramps at both Richmond Street doors, an elevator to all 5 floors, and accessible washrooms throughout. Our gallery is equipped with an automatic door and all programs are designed with access as a priority, including for mobility device users.  We commission audio description for core programs, and updates on any additional measures we develop in relation to specific audiences, artworks, or events will be posted as it becomes available.

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