Warrior from the Andes
September 26, 2024 to December 7, 2024
Exhibition Location: Sur Gallery, 39 Queens Quay East, Suite 100
Curated by Tamara Toledo.
PROGRAMMING:
Opening Reception and Performance by Claudia Bernal
Thursday, September 26, 7pm – 9pm, In-person
Register here.
Curator Talk on Claudia Bernal’s Artistic Practice
Thursday, November 21, 7-8pm, online
Register here.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Claudia Bernal’s first solo exhibition in Toronto, held after over twenty years of artistic practice, comes at a time of extreme violence and oppression in the world, where genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing have been sanctioned rather than blocked or condemned by Western governments. Within a settler colonial state that oppresses the existence of dissidence, the act of existence is to resist, and art within this context has become a tool of that same resistance. Bernal’s artistic practice involves her own body as a site of contestation, informed by her place of origin, Colombia, a state that has endured war, violence, forced displacement, and death. Warrior from the Andes alludes to the artists’ state as she settles and navigates on Indigenous land on Turtle Island while situating her own experiences and critical consciousness from the perspective of the Global South as a diasporic subject. A strong advocate against violence and forced displacement, Bernal’s work was as relevant twenty years ago as it is today.
The artist uses her subaltern diasporic body to contest coloniality within a predominantly white settler colonial state that renders her invisible. She challenges Eurocentric Western epistemologies and aesthetics and dismantles subjectivity to instead offer her own form of identification through various objects, images, and performances. Using her own in-between diasporic state as a strength and as a combative tool, she defies oppressive narratives and creates relationships of solidarity.
Bernal gains agency with the presence of her own body within the landscape of Canada that neglects her existence. She overcomes and empowers her own body as territory through actions, performances, text, and images, becoming an embodiment of strength and of endurance.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
CLAUDIA BERNAL is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and currently a Professor in the Department of Arts, Letters and Languages at UQAC (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi). Her work lies in-between visual art, performative theater, and literature. She holds a doctorate in Art Studies and Practices from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and in 2023, Bernal completed a postdoctoral degree in research-creation at CELAT-UQAC. Her current research focuses on the relationships between body-territory, identity, and resistance. Graduate in philology and languages ??from the National University of Colombia (1989), Bernal emigrated to Quebec in 1991 and completed her degree in Visual Arts in 1999 at UQAM. She holds a master's degree in Theater during which she deepened her research on text as an aesthetic material. The concepts of movement, migration, space, displacement, and identity are recurrent, and she has presented group and solo exhibitions in museums, artist-run centers, galleries and public spaces in Canada, Japan, Austria, Belgium, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Spain, among others. Claudia Bernal was awarded the prestigious scholarship from the Fonds de Recherche en Science et Culture de Québec (Quebec Fund for Research in Science and Culture) and has received various grants and awards from the Quebec Council of Arts and Letters, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Foundation of the University of Quebec in Montreal. Bernal lives and works between Montreal, Bogotá, and Chicoutimi.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Tamara Toledo is a curator, scholar, and artist based in Toronto. She is a graduate of OCAD University, with an MFA from York University, and is currently a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture. Her research focuses on hemispheric connections, decolonial methodologies and practices, diasporic histories, and the legacies of the Cold war era in contemporary art. Toledo is recipient of various grants, scholarships, and awards and has been published by ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal of the University of California. She has participated in various conferences and symposiums across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Toledo is currently the Director/Curator of Sur Gallery.
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: noon-6:00PM
Saturdays: 11 AM-5 PM
