EXHIBITION: Burnt Sugar
September 27, 2024 - November 16, 2024Curated by francesca ekwuyasi
featuring
Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shaya Ishaq, Bushra Junaid, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Oluseye
On view September 27–November 16, 2024
Opening Friday, September 27, 2024: Join us at 6pm for a walkthrough with the Curator + Artists followed by a celebratory reception
Critical Distance is pleased to present Burnt Sugar, curated by noted author francesca ekwuyasi and featuring new and recent works by Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shaya Ishaq, Bushra Junaid, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Oluseye. Drawing upon the artists’ longstanding engagement with themes of migration, identity, Blackness, and diaspora, Burnt Sugar explores the inextricable connections between labour, extraction and sugar production including the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlives. As a writer’s experiment in storytelling through the group exhibition format, the exhibition contends with sugar as both matter and metaphor, probing the intertwined histories of sugar from multiple artistic angles, yet with a clear curatorial focus and the skills, practices, and self-preservation strategies that enslaved people and their descendants maintained through their migrations, forced and otherwise.
A curatorial essay by francesca ekwuyasi, as well as a commissioned text by Yaniya Lee, are linked below. Editing by Alison Cooley. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, which will include both essays and full documentation of the artworks and exhibition.
Burnt Sugar was developed through the Ways of Attuning curatorial study group facilitated by WaveForm Collective (Liz Ikiriko and Toleen Touq).
Location and Access Info
Critical Distance Centre for Curators
Suite 122 at 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada
voicemail: 1-647-930-6930 / email: info@criticaldistance.ca
Critical Distance is located in Suite 122 on the ground floor at 401 Richmond, a wheelchair accessible building with ramps at both Richmond Street doors, and an accessible washroom on every level. The gallery is equipped with automatic doors, exhibitions are designed with mobility in mind, and we commission audio description for all core programs.
In addition to the gallery exhibition, work by Adama Delphine Fawundu will be featured on the Critical Distance billboard outside our former home at Youngplace, located at 180 Shaw Street between Dundas and Queen.
Updates on any additional measures we develop in relation to specific artworks or events will be posted as it becomes available. For any questions or more information, please contact us at info@criticaldistance.ca.
Thank you to our funders and supporters
Burnt Sugar is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. Critical Distance gratefully acknowledges operating support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Since 2016, Critical Distance has programmed the Billboard outside our former home at 180 Shaw Street between Dundas and Queen Streets. Thank you to Youngplace for their continued support and participation in this long-running public art initiative.
Image: Adama Delphine Fawundu, Sea Whispers for Mami Wata at the shore of Guanahani, 2022
About the Curator(s)
francesca ekwuyasi
francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist, and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. As an accomplished writer and artist in her own right, Burnt Sugar at Critical Distance is francesca’s first curatorial project, and an experiment in storytelling across mediums.
Find out moreAbout the Artist(s)
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist born in Brooklyn, NY, the ancestral space of the Lenni-Lanape. She is a descendant of the Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi peoples, and her distinct visual language centers indigenization and the power in ancestral knowledge and memory through photography, printmaking, video, sound, and assemblage.
Find out moreShaya Ishaq
Shaya Ishaq is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer whose research interests are engaged in craft, diaspora, design anthropology, and (afro)futurism. She has studied Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University and has previously attended Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. In 2023 Ishaq received the Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.
Find out moreBushra Junaid
Bushra Junaid is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, author, and arts administrator based in Toronto. Born in Montreal to Nigerian and Jamaican parents, and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Junaid is best known for exploring history, memory, cultural identity, and placemaking through mixed media collage, drawing, and painting.
Find out moreKosisochukwu Nnebe
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-born conceptual artist and writer. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics ranging from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. Nnebe is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria, and her work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada and internationally.
Find out moreOluseye
Oluseye is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. Using “diasporic debris” — a term he coined to describe the artifacts he collects on his trans-Atlantic travels — he traces Blackness through its multifaceted migrations and manifestations. These transformational objects are recast into sculpture, performance, and photography; their explorations invoke his personal narratives within a broader examination of Black and Diasporic identity, migration, and African spiritual traditions.
Find out moreContributing Writers and Editors
Yaniya Lee
Yaniya Lee’s writing and research track Black creative practice and narratives of liberation across the nation. She is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024, figure ground/Art Metropole) and Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (2024, Artexte).
Find out more