Critical Distance Program Type Core Program

Critical Distance is pleased to present Garden of Broken Shadows, curated by Fatma Hendawy Yehia, featuring 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. The fascination with building a new life elsewhere — thinking about immigration as an investment in the future — has become a condition of our times. While immigration can be perceived as a global commodity, used to improve people’s social status and well-being, the stories and histories held by migrant bodies are often tokenized through a western gaze. This exhibition is inspired by the personal experiences and stories that emerge from the condition of migration. 

The artists in Garden of Broken Shadows define their relationship with their native land and the process of migration that some of them went through, seeking refuge or a better living as immigrants. 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. 

Featuring works by Stephanie E Creaghan, Andy Slater, Gillian Dykeman, Chandra Melting Tallow, Ashna Jacob, Aislinn Thomas, Anne Macmillan, Tamyka Bullen, and Dayna Danger
Curated by Megan Gnanasihamany and Morgan Melenka

On view: October 6 – November 26, 2022
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 6th, 7 to 9 pm

The making of art history is a process of translation. It flattens and unfolds through digital interfaces and methodologies of internet conservation, allowing exhibitions to spread through a temporal daisy chain of image, text, catalog, and critique. This chain of distillation — from material art object or experience to description and flat image—disseminates cultural themes, concepts, and conclusions across artistic landscapes, allowing for particular figures, galleries, and publications to become authoritative texts on contemporary work. Taking the 2018 Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition Anthropocene as its starting point, The Equivalence of Alloyed Gold is a year-long experimental commissioning and exhibition process hosted by Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) incorporating ideas of communication and sensory translation.

Place Settings: Part II
Featuring works by Adrià Julià, Larissa Sansour, and Reza Nik

Curated by Noa Bronstein

Place Settings continues this summer with performance-based projects staged throughout the city of Toronto. Each project engages in a discursive gesture that considers new possibilities at the intersections of food practices and public space, revealing the shareable and relational qualities of both. 

Curated by AXIS Curatorial (Noor Alé and Claudia Mattos)
Featuring Farah Al Qasimi, Kaya Joan, Bea Parsons, Yelaine Rodriguez, Whyishnave Suthagar

Opening Reception
Saturday, April 23, 2022
1 – 4PM EST
401 Richmond Building, Suite 122

Of the Sacred is an exhibition that gathers a selection of artists who examine the divine through a highly personal lens, attesting to belief as a means of unearthing histories of colonialism, translocation, and individual circumstance. Tracing cultural inheritances of faith, lineages of intergenerational knowledge, and the syncretism of beliefs that emerge in the face of migrations, Of the Sacred initiates conversations about the role of belief in this time in history and the need for sanctuary—on a personal and collective scale—in light of the conditions of this age.

Of the Sacred is a Core Exhibition of the 2022 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Artists: Tanya Lukin Linklater, Laurie Kang, Lila De Magalhaes, Nona Inescu, Jenine Marsh
Curator: Chris Andrews

You sit in a garden brings together the work of Tanya Lukin Linklater, Laurie Kang, Jenine Marsh, Lila de Magalhaes, and Nona Inescu. Each included work proposes a new bodily form, movement, or way to touch, pushing for an expanded definition of what a body should be.