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Cindy Mochizuki, 8 anew/m# (2022) water colour drawings and digital collage. Image courtesy of the artist.
EXHIBITIONS
Fugitive Rituals: Nicolas Fleming, SF Ho, Cindy Mochizuki, Lisa Myers, Laura Pitkanen, Camille Turner and Alize Zorlutuna
30 July–4 December 2022
Frances K. Smith Gallery, Atrium, Etherington House and Franks Gallery

Exhibition Celebration
15 August, 7–9 pm

Curated by Myung-Sun Kim

Cultural spaces like galleries can facilitate civic conversations, amplify polyphonic perspectives, and act as provocations to consider how we live together. The artists in Fugitive Rituals explore the possibilities of attaining sustenance and autonomous futures, while leaving colonial practices and frameworks behind.

Writer and scholar Tina Campt defines fugitivity as the daily practice of refusal. Not an act of flight, nor escape, nor strategy of resistance, but a refusal of the very terms of negation and dispossession. Using this definition, the exhibition itself is a fugitive act of self-determination, which actively shapes the culture in which it is embedded through the repetition, returning, and shifting of its practices – its daily rituals.

The works in Fugitive Rituals respond to various types of collections—artworks and cultural belongings from Agnes’s vault; apples foraged along the borders of Colonization Roads and other military sites in Ontario; and debris produced from exhibition-making as well as from daily living. In extending Campt’s description of going beyond simply looking at objects and images to being touched and moved by them, to listen to their “felt sounds,” these works amplify the quiet, yet deeply felt resonances of cultural belongings.

These resonating sounds guide visitors throughout the exhibition offering rituals to dream fiercely towards a self-determined futurity that is centered on the living. Through sonic meditation, as well as rituals of healing, grieving and dreaming, they allow objects and the spirits embedded within them to tell their stories, as what has been silenced returns and reverberates to haunt the gallery walls.

As we shift away from settler colonial practices of dispossession and institutional supremacy, how do we bring compassion and care to the acts of looking inward and reflecting on our own participation? How do we refuse the settler colonial terms embedded in all the spaces we occupy and in the air we breathe?

Exhibition design consultant: Nicolas Fleming
Special thank you to the artists in the project, Emelie Chhangur, Alicia Boutilier, Leah Cox, Mark Birksted, Scott Wallis, Ben Darrah, the larger Agnes Etherington Art Centre team, Althea Balmes, Clare Butcher and Jody Chan
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario; David Bain Memorial Fund, Robert Sutherland Visitorship and the Inclusive Community Fund, Queen’s University.
Hero image: Cindy Mochizuki, 8 anew/m# (detail), 2022, water colour drawings and digital collage. Image courtesy of the artist
Installation views from Lisa Myers & Laura Pitkanen, "All Those Lines," 2022, apples, foraged plants, found objects, sugar, glass, metal, rust, and audio. Photo: Tim Forbes
Installation views from Lisa Myers & Laura Pitkanen, All Those Lines, 2022, apples, foraged plants, found objects, sugar, glass, metal, rust, and audio. Photo: Tim Forbes
Installation view of Camille Turner's "Dream Room" (2022) showing iceberg like structures to sit on with a dreamy interstellar light display in reds, greens, blues and purples.
Installation view of Camille Turner's Dream Room (2022). Photo: Paul Litherland
Installation view of Alize Zorlutuna and SF Ho’s "Su Yollu Bulur (Water Finds Its Way)," currently on view in "Fugitive Rituals." pc: Paul Litherland
Installation view of Alize Zorlutuna and SF Ho’s Su Yollu Bulur (Water Finds Its Way). Photo: Paul Litherland
An Institute for Curatorial Inquiry. Performance, Exit Through the Back Door Laughing with Alize Zorlutuna and SF Ho
An Institute for Curatorial Inquiry. Performance, Exit Through the Back Door Laughing with Alize Zorlutuna and SF Ho. Photo: Tim Forbes
Cindy Mochizuki, "8anew/M#" (details), 2022, Audio (12 minutes duration), two drawings, one replica of omikuji (fortune) box from Agnes; installation view from "Fugitive Rituals," 2022
Cindy Mochizuki, 8anew/M# (detail), 2022, Audio (12 minutes duration), two drawings, one replica of omikuji (fortune) box from Agnes; installation view from Fugitive Rituals, 2022. Photo: Paul Litherland
Nicolas Fleming's "A Mudroom," on view in "Fugitive Rituals." pc: Christian Cantarutti
Nicolas Fleming's A Mudroom. Photo: Christian Cantarutti

Listen to two audio pieces by artists in Fugitive Rituals, available online until
31 March 2023

LISA MYERS AND LAURA PITKANEN'S UNDER FIRE - FORAGING AT THE MEAFORD TANK RANGE (2022)

As part of the artwork All Those Lines artists Lisa Myers and Laura Pitkanen offer their experiences foraging for food during the pandemic. Their travels take them to lesser known locales like the Meaford Tank Range, Ontario, Canada. Their stories acknowledge the layers of dispossession within the land we now know as Canada.

CAMILLE TURNER'S DREAM ROOM (2022)

Drawing on memory, the imaginative space of world-making, and the human capacity to dream, Turner’s Dream Room is a sonic portal that offers a glimpse of a future in which the elusive dream of freedom has been achieved. This work builds on Turner’s Afronautic methodology—walking, listening, feeling, imagining, and responding to the remnants of  past, present, and future. Dream Room invites visitors to sit with a meditation guided by African cultural belongings languishing in underground vaults. These spirits, left behind by African descended people who made their exodus from earth to create liberated worlds on other stars, call upon the travelers to return to the present to recover their sacred knowledge for the future.

Sonic meditation (05:30), drywall, joint compound and various construction materials, haunting presence of African cultural belongings in the institution’s collection, dreams of a liberated Afrofuture.
Project design collaborator: Nicolas Fleming
Composer/sound engineer: Ravi Naimpally

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Camille Turner’s Dream Room (2022)
Listen to the soundtrack to Camille Turner's "Dream Room" (2022)
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Camille Turner’s Dream Room (2022)
Listen to the soundtrack to Camille Turner's "Dream Room" (2022)

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