Critical Distance FEATURING

Join us at Critical Distance on Friday, October 3, 6:30 – 8 pm for the Toronto launch of two new books in conversation: As for Protocols (Vera List Center for Art and Politics/Amherst College Press, 2025) and Convivialities (Talonbooks, 2025). New York-based writer, editor, and curator Re’al Christian, co-editor of As for Protocols, will be joined by Montréal-based writer and editor Michael Nardone, editor of Convivialities, for a conversation on the editorial/curatorial practices and perspectives at the core of their two volumes. Both books emerge out of sustained engagements with writers and artists; together, Christian and Nardone will consider how the array of artists and writers involved in their editions articulate the contemporary conditions, relational affinities, and protocols of making.…Find out more

Critical Distance is pleased to partner with Dancemakers for their inaugural symposium, What Can Dance Curation Do? This two-day gathering brings together artists, curators, and researchers to explore emergent practices in dance curation through a series of talks, panels, and provocations.

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Critical Distance is pleased to present Scooped and Scattered, a public art billboard by English River First Nation artist Catherine Blackburn. Presented in-gallery as part of our 2023 exhibition Materialized (curated by Ariel Smith and co-presented with Native Women in the Arts), this re-installation of Blackburn’s work is to celebrate the recent release of CDCC’s Access Working Group (AWG) Report, and to honour Blackburn’s participation in creative access consultation and production in collaboration with Disabled arts workers, community members, and Critical Distance.

For AWG, organizational partners Critical Distance, Tangled Art + Disability, and Carleton University Art Gallery engaged with artists, curators, accessibility experts, and audio describers in Toronto and beyond, facilitating the translation of various exhibitions and artworks into mediating formats primarily intended for blind or low vision communities. For the Materialized exhibition in particular, the AWG brought together audio describer Kat Germain and Melanie Marsden, a blind Anishinaabekwe, to engage directly with artists in the exhibition, including Catherine Blackburn. Through an exploratory process attending to the ways in which works could be described and translated, new connections between the intricate processes of description and the meticulous methods of craft were made.

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Critical Distance is pleased to present artist Adama Delphine Fawundu’s billboard Sea Whispers for Mami Wata at the shore of Guanahani, as part of Burnt Sugar, curated by francesca ekwuyasi 

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an inter-organizational research platform with Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Carleton University Art Gallery, and Tangled Art + Disability With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, from 2021 to 2023, Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) initiated and steered an inter-organizational research platform, whose purpose was to advance an understanding of the creative possibilities of accessibility strategies in exhibition-making and live events. In collaboration with our two committed partners, Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) and Tangled Art + Disability, the Access Working Group (AWG) evolved over the years as a consortium of voices, perspectives, and practices thinking together about access in contemporary art across different organizational structures, curatorial methodologies, and presentation formats. A spirit of invention guided this journey…Find out more