Critical Distance Program Type Core Program

Billboard on Shaw presented by Critical Distance, featuring EBBÓ (Sacrifice): Orula, The Witness, by Yelaine Rodriguez, 2021. This public installation is presented in conjunction with OF THE SACRED, a Core Exhibition at the 2022 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, curated by Curated by Noor Alé and Claudia Mattos (AXIS Curatorial). The billboard features the work of Yelaine Rodriguez. Yelaine is an Afro-Dominican artist who looks to the syncretism of Afro-Caribbean belief systems—including Voodoo and Santeria—originating in the Yoruban faith, a religion brought to the Caribbean from West Africa as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. The artist stages and photographs scenes in which individuals outfitted in lushly patterned and textured costumes—of the artist’s own design—are depicted in tableau-style settings as…Find out more

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.

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Deadline to apply: 15 March 2022 at 12PM/noon EST.

wave~form~projects in conjunction with Critical Distance Centre for Curators is excited to announce the open call for Ways of Attuning: A Curatorial Study Group, set to begin in late spring of 2022. The program is a learner-focused mentoring and study group based in Tkaronto/Toronto that aims to create a collaborative learning environment in which everyone is an active, knowledge-sharing member.

For this pilot edition, we are seeking applications from curators and cultural practitioners who are interested and invested in developing their practice in a collaborative, experimental, and anti-racist environment. The program will integrate the conceptual, practical, and personal aspects of curatorial practice into the learning process, allowing for imaginative thinking around curatorial possibilities.

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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.

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This billboard is presented as part of the group exhibition Groundwork, curated by Valérie Frappier for Critical Distance. Featuring artists Alana Bartol, Ileana Hernandez Camacho, and Tsēmā Igharas, the exhibition grapples with the mindset of extractivism and highlights how site-specific performance can bring focus to alternative ways of relating with land. Groundwork is a Featured Exhibition of the 2021 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Groundwork foregrounds camouflage as a performance strategy to investigate the divide between human and non-human. Displayed here is documentation of a 2019 performance by Tsēmā titled real camo. The action took place on the obsidian quarry where her Tahltan ancestors harvested the volcanic rock in her territory’s mountains, located in the north-west of so-called British Columbia. In pointing to her…Find out more