Event Category: visual arts

The Traces That Remain explores the after-effects. The exhibition asks: what reverberating repercussions remain in the body and mind following significant events that have affected us? Are we the only ones affected? How do these traces manifest over the course of a minute, a year, a lifetime? Are they always obvious, or do they slip into the subconscious in the form of memories and nightmares? Do they always eventually become experience, resilience? Addressing these questions, this exhibition brings together artists who reflect on what lingers after the fact/the effect.

Shaya Ishaq introduces these questions through her interest in the liminality of rites of passage; Po B K Lomami fashions an intimate experiment to interrogate how grief remains; Zinnia Naqvi exposes the scars left by institutions that choose not to support visible minorities; and Lan Florence Yee probes the painful consequences that follow difficult situations. On top of this, The Traces That Remain also explores the form archives can take, as well as who and what is remembered.

 

Curated by: eunice bélidor

Featuring work from : Po B. K. Lomami + Zinnia Naqvi + Shaya Ishaq + Lan Florence Yee

In Hybrid Condition Vietnamese-Canadian artist Tam Khoa Vu explores cultural hybridity through multiple video and audio installations using a blend of personal, archival, and modern-day footage. Vu’s work is playful, even mischievous, as the artist aims to create spaces of abundance, possibility, and nuance around the issues involved in representing liminal Vietnamese identities. Vu navigates a diasporic “third space” between Vietnam and Canada. In Hybrid Condition, footage emphasizing Vietnamese identity and diaspora allows the artist to dig into the roots of cultural, ethnic, and national identities in such a way as to call into question Western hegemony and its influence over Vietnam, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-Canadian identity.

Palestinian-born and Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Rehab Nazzal employs a variety of media to examine the devastating effects of settler-colonial violence on the Palestinian people, land and non-human life. Driving in Palestine is a multimedia installation that combines photography, video, printed matter, and sound to offer glimpses of Israel’s structures of segregation, confinement, surveillance and restriction to freedom of movement that proliferate the occupied West Bank. Captured from moving vehicles on Palestinian roads spanning 2010 to 2020, a decade of images compels viewers to question the link between suppression and debilitation of Indigenous people and the attempts to expropriate and destroy their land. Nazzal’s work reveals a regime that suffocates, surveils and controls the Palestinian’s mobility within and beyond their territories. It invites viewers to witness manifestations of this regime including the apartheid wall, military checkpoints, gates, fences, watchtowers, and roadblocks that Palestinians have had to navigate for the past 70 years.

➞ Curatorial text by Stefan St-Laurent