VEHEMENCE
October 5, 2017 – December 2, 2017
Curated by Tamara Toledo
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 5, 2017, 7-9 PM
Remarks and Artist Talk between Osvaldo Ramírez Castillo and Fidel Peña: 8pm
A Conversation on Regina Jose Galindo's work and Canadian Mining Companies’ Impact in Guatemala: Friday, November 17, 7-9 PM
Speakers: Academics and Professors Steven Schnoor (Concordia University), Dot Tuer (OCAD University), Canadian performance artist and writer Irene Loughlin, Angelica Choc and Grahame Russell from Rights Action.
The exhibition explores the human body as a site of trauma and memory. Artists and designers in Vehemence create an intense vernacular informed by personal and collective narratives that transpire in Central America having a cause and effect in our lives in Canada.
For decades, Central America has been subject to abominable human right violations. Violence pervades social and cultural life with abductions, torture, death squads, and massacres of women, children and the elderly. Indigenous people are subject to the most disruptive forms of repression and fight a long battle against large corporations that are killing the land and people in the name of profit. Drug trafficking across the borders increase the violence and social instability of many, while governments do little to improve the livelihood of its population. Artists in Vehemence having come from Central America bring a particularly compelling voice as they offer testaments, political outcries, and denunciations through the genre of drawing, performance and design. Artists Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Osvaldo Ramírez Castillo (El Salvador/Canada), and Underline (El Salvador/Canada) attest to these realities not as abstract notions of the disruptive, but as visceral testaments. Images that will either upset the sheltered or remind us of a past of trauma, we all are subject to questioning our own accountability as privileged spectators.
