EXHIBITION: We Look at Animals Because
January 25, 2018 - March 25, 2018Featuring Quratulain Butt, Khaled Hourani, Maha Maamoun, Smriti Mehra, Huma Mulji, Ed Panar, Alex Sheriff, and Andrea Luka Zimmerman | Curated by Toleen Touq and Nahed Mansour
In partnership with South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), Critical Distance is pleased to present We Look At Animals Because, an exhibition that gazes on animality. Through the lens of spectatorship, the show explores the shifting ways in which animals are regarded, represented and accorded meaning in post-industrial landscapes. Exhibiting photographs, video, works on paper, and sculpture, the featured artists reveal the nuanced, complicated and unexpected paradoxes that mark our relationships with cosmopolitan animals.
Exhibition on view at Critical Distance:
180 Shaw Street, Suite 302 at Artscape Youngplace, M6J 2W5
Admission is always free; building and gallery are fully accessible.
New gallery hours:
Thursday–Sunday from 12–5 pm
Also on view beyond the gallery:
Billboard on Shaw Street by Quratulain Butt and
Hallway Video by Smriti Mehra (stay tuned for more information on screenings)
Join us for an opening reception with the curators:
Thursday, January 25th from 6–9 pm
Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
A complementary series of public learning events to be held at both Youngplace and at SAVAC’s location at 401 Richmond will be announced soon.
About South Asian Visual Arts Centre
SAVAC is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to increasing the visibility of culturally diverse artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development and creating a community for our artists. SAVAC was founded to be an organization staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour.
South Asian Visual Arts Centre | 450-401 Richmond St. W | Toronto, Ontario | M5V3A8 | Canada
www.savac.net / 416-542-1661 / Facebook / Twit
Critical Distance and South Asian Visual Arts Centre are grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Council in making this exhibition possible.
Image: Huma Mulji, Lakhon Main Aik (one in a million), 2008, courtesy of the artist.
About the Curator(s)
Toleen Touq
Toleen Touq is a curator, cultural producer and writer who has recently moved to Toronto. Her approach takes site-responsiveness as a methodology to build radical pedagogical platforms and alternative knowledge systems.
Find out moreNahed Mansour
Nahed Mansour is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and curator. Working in video, installation, and performance, her works typically draw on visual archives to highlight the relationship between entertainment, labour, and processes of racialization and gendering.
Find out moreAbout the Artist(s)
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
Andrea Luka Zimmerman studied at Central St. Martins (where she now teaches) for her PhD. She won the Artangel Open Award for her collaborative feature drama Cycle (2017) with Adrian Jackson. Her feature documentary Estate, a Reverie (2015), tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it once offered.
Find out moreAlex Sheriff
Ed Panar
Huma Mulji
Huma Mulji works with sculpture, photography, drawing, and painting, creating material juxtapositions which are attentive to the absurd, and question notions of certainty, and truth. Her works broadly address notions of failure and neglect, endurance and transformation.
Find out moreSmriti Mehra
Smriti Mehra is a video artist. Interacting with Bangalore’s ever changing, ever-growing residents with their multilingual, cultural, economic backgrounds, she has become a mapmaker of the city’s desires, hopes, needs, dreams and disparities.
Find out moreMaha Maamoun
Maha Maamoun is a Cairo-based Egyptian artist. Her work is generally interested in examining the form, function and currency of common cultural visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are weaved into.
Find out moreKhaled Hourani
Khaled Hourani lives and works in Ramallah. He was the Artistic Director 2007-2010 and the Director of the International Academy of Art Palestine from 2010 to 2013. Previously worked as General Director of the Fine Arts Department in the Palestinian Ministry of Culture (2004-06).
Find out moreQuratulain Butt
Quratulain Butt was born in Rawalpindi Pakistan in 1980. She is trained as a Miniature painter and sculptor at the National College of the Arts Lahore, Pakistan and Hunerkada academy of visual and Performing Arts Islamabad, Pakistan. Quratulain’s work shares concerns like social hierarchy, war conflict, hypocrisy and self reflection/hope.
Find out moreGallery
