Critical Distance Program Type Core Program

Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) is pleased to present The Contingent Image, an artistic and curatorial collaboration and exhibition-as-research developed by Peterborough-based artist John Climenhage in conversation with CDCC Director Shani Khoo Parsons. Featuring an expansive new body of work that Climenhage has been developing since 2015, The Contingent Image is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Toronto in over 20 years. 

As an exhibition-as-research, The Contingent Image is an invitation to visitors to participate through the making of their own unique assemblages on a large table in the gallery space using a selection of Climenhage’s original works set aside for this purpose. In conversations that arise through this hands-on opportunity, visitors can gain insight not only into Climenhage’s artistic processes in relation to contemporary painting and abstraction—they can experience for themselves, firsthand, a sense of how “painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition.” ² With each ‘refresh,’ other images and ideas will rise to the surface as visual and conceptual associations between shapes, colours, lines, volumes, and voids are dissolved and reconstituted anew. 

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Critical Distance is pleased to welcome you to STUDY HALL, our newest initiative in support of critical curatorial inquiry, community, and practice. This Winter we’re opening up our space and our program to explore more nimble, flexible, responsive and mutually supportive frameworks for curatorial commoning and collaboration. 

All are welcome to drop in and visit, ask questions, peruse our featured publications, and join in the conversation on curating today. Outside public hours, visit our Instagram page @critical.distance for links to our survey, e-Shop, and newsletter subscription form, so you can be in the know on upcoming programs, events, and other ways to get involved.

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In 2023, we embarked upon a yearlong research and community consultation process under the banner of New Directions for Critical Distance. Still reeling from pandemic-related setbacks, we had identified strategic and financial planning as key to our recovery. Thanks to the Government of Canada’s Community Services Recovery Fund, we were able to design an integrated, multi-phase process that began in consultation with key mentors, curatorial peers, and stakeholders from across the sector. Through an in-depth survey developed in collaboration with senior market analyst and consultant Marina Mandić, plus over 40 hours of face-to-face community consultations between CDCC Director Shani Khoo Parsons and emerging, midcareer, and established curators from across Canada, we engaged a representative sampling of ~150 curatorial colleagues in conversation and critical questions…Find out more

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.

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thinking about forever  is presented by Images Festival in partnership with Critical Distance Centre for Curators. Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma, and featuring works by Azadeh Elmizadeh, Maryam Tafakory, Shelley Niro and Anna Gronau, the exhibition explores refusal as an unwillingness to accept. In an ableist imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy, refusal is also a mode of being that requires consistent rehearsal in order for one to sustain themselves against the violence of these interlocking hegemonic systems.

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