Diaspora Dialogues: Archiving the Familiar
Oct. 4 - Dec. 2, 2024
About the Exhibition
“…the archive represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, and the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity in an artistic movement.” Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall’s quote underscores the significance of situating this exhibition as a moment of self-reflection on the contributions of Latin American diaspora media artists to Canadian media art histories. The contested terrain of both the terms “archive” and “diaspora” requires deeper consideration since this exhibition asks what is the meaning behind making these two terms form a dialogue with one another. Diaspora Dialogues: Archiving the Familiar features contemporary artworks by Cecilia Araneda, Rosalina Libertad Cerritos, Amanda Gutiérrez, Soledad Fátima Muñoz, and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. All from the Latin American diaspora, these artists apply a variety of critical and aesthetic approaches to archiving. In addition, the exhibition is in dialogue with a virtual screening of video art by women artists from the 70s and 80s hosted on VIVO Media Arts Centre website entitled Women& Art: Political Praxes of Memory. This dialogue that has been established between Latin American video artist pioneers from Brazil and Chile foregrounds the diaspora’s relationship with “original” culture, “copy”, and“archive”.
The syncretic nature of diaspora peoples and cultures, the doubling of places, the passages and slippages between past and present, here and there, mother tongues and adopted tongues, all foreground the fluidity and porousness of diaspora identities and ways of being as dialogic. This exhibition engages with (dis)articulations of the archive as syncretic through formal and conceptual experimentations of master codes and narratives. Diaspora archives interrupt racist nationalism and border enforcement ideologies by making visible histories of violence and interventionism in the Global Southall of which have created the conditions for being in diaspora in the settler-nation-state, on stolen Indigenous lands, known as Canada.
Diaspora Dialogues opens an inquiry into how archival memory can articulate diaspora histories, experiences, and knowledge. How does looking at these artworks that engage the archive produce a contemporary historical experience? What new possibilities does this exhibition open up as we engage with intergenerational Latin American and diaspora media histories and futures? The archive as a negotiable terrain linked to the collective imaginary calls into question the absences, gaps, and silences of an archive that is mediated by hierarchies and power structures. Colonization, patriarchy, white supremacy, racial capitalism have all shaped historical narratives, collective memory, and how we access and interpret information. In the field of media art, archival safeguarding and archeology continue to pose very practical problems of how to ensure the legacy of artworks that use digital and analogue machines, computer languages, pixels, binary digits, and the numeric codes used to mediate diasporic stories.
The initial impulse for this exhibition is the result of a documentary film project which dialogues with Latin American media art archives through an intergenerational and feminist perspective. This exhibition intends to follow its lead and establish an ongoing dialogue with Latin American diaspora women, working within the Canadian settler-nation-state, using archives as a strategy of inquiry and resistance. Through dialogic meaning-making processes, these artworks highlight how our social, and political situatedness in the world intersects with memory and power. The artworks in DiasporaDialogues make visible the living political memory of the diaspora through diverse media art languages, manifesting affective approaches to the archive as a site of interpretation, contestation, and negotiation. Here, the archive is personal, familiar, familial, political, gendered, fragmented, embodied, and living.
Diaspora Dialogues: Archiving the Familiar ultimately produces a curatorial archive that aims to generate further dialogue on the significant contributions, knowledge production, and archival safeguarding of diaspora communities within and despite the nation state. It is important to highlight how border regimes have been catalysts for the conditions of migration and diaspora within Canada. The hemispheric dialogues between North and South speak to ongoing violent histories of Indigenous genocide, dispossession, occupation, and oppressive forms of government. Diaspora histories are thus tied to the violence of borders with its walls and wars. The exhibition thus creates dialogic mediations between the artists, their communities, and their histories, disrupting neoliberal national discourses of multiculturalism. The archive is gendered, racialized, and political; these artists are agents telling and safeguarding their own diasporic histories through the language of media art.
Co-curated by Sarah Shamash and Tamara Toledo
Financially supported by the Toronto Friends of the VisualArts.
PROGRAMMING
Opening Reception:
Wednesday, October 4, 7-9pm
Curator Tour with Sarah Shamash:
Saturday, October 7, noon-1pm
Women & Art: Political Praxes of Memory
Virtual Screening of Video Art: Chile and Brazil of the 1970s-80s
October 21 to November 4, 2023
Artist Talk with Amanda Gutie?rrez and Gabriela Aceves Sepu?lveda:
Thursday, October 19th, 7-8pm
Latin American Speakers Series: Presentation by Claudia Calirman
Feminist or Feminine?
Thursday, October 26, 7-9pm
Artist Talk with Cecilia Araneda, Rosalina Libertad Cerritos, and Soledad Mun?oz:
Thursday, November 9, 7-8pm
Curator Tour with Tamara Toledo:
Saturday, November 25, 1-2pm
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Cecilia Araneda is a Winnipeg-based Chilean Canadian filmmaker and curator. Her works have screened at venues such as Visions du Reél, Ann Arbor, Images, RIDM, Documenta Madrid, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, TIFF Wavelengths, Film Anthology Archives, and Maysles Documentary Center. Araneda’s debut feature film, INTERSECTION was released in the fall of 2022. Araneda holds a BFA from York University, an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and is additionally a three-time alumna of Film Farm.
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and is a media artist and cultural historian with a research focus on feminist media art, research-creation and Latin American art and its diasporas. She is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University (SIAT). Aceves Sepúlveda is a member of art/mamas, a Vancouver-based collective of artist mothers and sono(soro)ridades, a group of feminist sound artists, activists, and scholars investigating the affective and political dimensions of sound.
Soledad Fátima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and researcher born in Canada and raised in Chile. Muñoz studied Film at Universidad ARCIS in Santiago, Chile, she has a Diploma in Textile Arts from Capilano University in North Vancouver Canada, a BFA from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design, and an MFA from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Muñoz is the recipient of various awards such as the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship.
Amanda Gutiérrez was born in Mexico City and is currently based in Montreal. Gutiérrez completed her MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Arts and Humanities at Concordia University in the Arts and Humanities Doctoral program. Art residencies include FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, Bolit Art Center in Spain. Gutiérrez has exhibited at The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harvestworks in NYC, SBC Gallery and Undefined Radio in Montreal, and Errant Bodies Studio Press in Berlin.
Rosalina Libertad Cerritos was born in Mexico City, her parents are from El Salvador, and she grew up in the Canadian West Coast. Her practice is multidimensional and multi-sensorial. In her work she explores and imagines new narratives and new futures through a process and exercise of reconstruction, reconciliation and reconnection to her memories and history. She works and lives in the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people, that includes the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Sarah Shamash is an Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work as a media artist has been supported by arts council funding and comprises a wide variety of formats; her works have shown in curated exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Shamash’s most recent documentary project, From Chile to Canada: Media Herstories premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival (2022) and is currently showing in festivals internationally. Her scholarly research examines Latin American and diaspora film and media cultures with a focus on Brazil.
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 scholarly and curatorial research focuses on hemispheric connections, decolonial methodologies and practices, diasporic histories, and the legacies of the Cold war era in contemporary art. Published by ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal of the University of California, Toledo 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 (during exhibition):
Thursday - Friday noon-6:00PM
Sat 11 AM-5 PM
Location:
100-39 Queens Quay East, Toronto
