Critical Distance PROGRAMMING EXHIBITION > Learning to Be Here

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 15th, 2026 from 6pm-9pm
Curatorial Talkback: Thursday, January 15th, 2026 from 6:30pm-7pm
Please RSVP here.

Learning to Be Here is an exhibition of five looping films by Anika Iyer, Dee Dee Decay, Hala Alsalman, Wang Zi, and Xinyi Tian. Embodiment within a decentralized lens → these films focus on the curiosity of deciphering communication sequences, understanding hi/stories through an oneiric epistemology, symbolic cognition, forming self through communal mark-making, and practices of re-languaging.

Curated by Jasmine Liaw, she is drawn to notions and strategies of unworlding. Unworlding, coined by Jack Halberstam, is the open invitation to do the hard work of un-making entrenched world systems of power that affect bodies and being. These films allow us to let go of these established containers and arrangements → as a way of “world-making” through reframing communication systems and destabilizing socially bounded concepts with diverse articulations
of emergence.

In this process of Learning to Be Here, the memory of sounding time made me curious about visualizing non-time? In an attempt to offer a different embodied relationship to time, all of the films in this exhibition are shown on one large plinth screen, with the ability to project the films on both sides. The first side (facing out of the gallery) cycles through the five films, but with each rotation, an additional loop is added to every film, cumulatively expanding the exhibition’s duration until each reaches five loops. The second side (facing into the gallery) loops through all of the films just once, repeating without accumulation. Both sides loop the films as an in-flux relationship, challenging this sense of arrival using visual duration. This curatorial approach transforms how we choose to sit with experimental films, how they are accessed, as well as the expanded significance when sustained together: a collective endurance for decentralization.

Thanks to OCAD University’s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers for their support of this Career Launcher Partnership.

Critical Distance would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.