Critical Distance is excited to partner with Dancemakers’ on their inaugural Dance Curation Working Group. Bringing together a group of independent dance curators to attend Dancemakers’ programming as well as other relevant programs across the GTA, we will experience, reflect, discuss, and engage with dance curators working in the field. The inagural cohort includes (top left across to bottom): Lukas Malkowski, abisola oni, Natalia Arancibia, Wai Liu, Kiera Forde, Kin Nguien, Roxy Menzies, Sarah Koekkoek, Holly Chang, Kage Wolfe, Meek & Bryce Taylor.

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Critical Distance is thrilled to launch our latest initiative to support curatorial practices across Canada and beyond. Titled Peer-to-Peer, this Directory-based program shines a spotlight on emerging, midcareer, and established curators whose projects and practices have attracted the notice of colleagues in the field.

Please join us in congratulating the First Circle curators, namely:

Amin Alsaden
Fatma Hendawy Yehia
Genevieve Wallen
Kate Whiteway
Lillian O’Brien Davis
Liz Ikiriko
Noor Alé
Sean Lee
Swapnaa Tamhane
Zoë Chan

All curators featured through this program receive an updatable profile in a special section of Critical Distance’s searchable online Directory, through which researchers and potential collaborators can search by location, specialization, and interest in order to connect on opportunities in curating, writing, speaking, teaching, consulting, studio visits, and more.

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Garden of Broken Shadows, curated by Fatma Hendawy Yehia, features works by Lamis Haggag, Katherine Melançon, Ahmed Naji, Anahita Norouzi, and El Rass. In a transglobal world, race and class are the basis of any immigration system. Through the use of organic material, text, sound, and technology, these artists manifest the ways in which one could survive and adapt within new environments. The exhibition interweaves these practices, producing a temporal space in which visitors can experience the possibilities of being both here and there — in both Canada and the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) — simultaneously. 

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Performance documentation (still), Ivanie Aubin-Malo in response to work by naakita feldman-kiss at SAW Video (Ottawa), 2018.
PUBLIC SYNTAX: SAW Video at CRITICAL DISTANCE Opening Reception: Saturday, February 9th from 2–4 pm Curated by Neven Lochhead and presented in partnership with SAW Video Media Art Centre, Ottawa. Featuring work by naakita feldman-kiss, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Henry Andersen, Mara Eagle, Phil Rose, Molly Teitelbaum, Anna Queen, and The Video in the Public Sphere Working Group. In partnership with SAW Video Media Art Centre (Ottawa), Critical Distance is pleased to present ​Public Syntax, ​an exhibition that highlights the distinct time-based practices and approaches of seven artists, as well as those participating in the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group, the majority of whom are either Ottawa-based or connected. Situated in-gallery at Critical Distance and across multiple public spaces at Artscape Youngplace,Find out more
Critical Distance is pleased to present Precious Commodity, a group exhibition of recent 
works by Eunice Luk, Ella Dawn McGeough, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, and Biliana Velkova, curated by 
Alison Cooley. Articulating a tension between objects and their ways of being—their forms, their significance, 
their social and economic circulation—Precious Commodity brings together artworks that 
examine the complicated sweetness of things. Unanchoring objects from their exchange 
within capitalism, the artists in the exhibition resignify them as vessels for fantasy, desire, 
and alternate possibility. Reflecting on the nature of a world populated by things with 
definitive practical uses and monetary values, each artist playfully contends with form, 
usurping existing representations in the service of building new meanings. Find out more