A listening series that challenges the ubiquitous consumption of music, including notable composers, musicians, scholars and artists discussing de-colonial, queer, feminist, black and Indigenous-specific forms of listening. This is a free and evolving event series—presenters will be playing a selection of musical pieces for audiences, followed by critical conversation and open dialogue. All are welcome and classes are heavily encouraged to attend. No registration required. Please get in touch with Associate Curator, Academic Outreach for more information: academicoutreach@queensu.ca

Friday 1 February 2019, 1–3pm
Layli Long Soldier and Tanya Lukin Linklater

Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. Most recently, she received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances in museums, videos and installations have been exhibited in Canada, the United States and abroad. Her work centres Indigenous knowledge production in and through orality, conversation and embodied practices, including dance. She considers That which sustains us a conceptual and affective line within her work, alongside histories and structural violences that Indigenous peoples continue to respond to. In 2017, as a member of Wood Land School, she participated in Under the Mango Tree – Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. In 2018 Lukin Linklater will present a commissioned performance for Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Lukin Linklater was the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in Alaska and is based in Northern Ontario.

Thursday 7 February, 11:30am–1:30pm
Ashon Crawley, Katherine McKittrick and Cecily Nicholson

Ashon Crawley, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination and, forthcoming with Duke University Press, The Lonely Letters, an exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. All his work is about otherwise possibility.

Katherine McKittrick is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies. She teaches and researches in the fields of Black Studies, anti-colonial studies, studies of race, cultural geographies and gender studies. Her research is interdisciplinary and attends to the links between theories of liberation, black studies, and the arts.

Thursday 14 February, 12:30–2:30pm
Peter Morin, Camille Georgeson-Usher and Syrus Marcus Ware, Listening & Love

Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist and curator. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped, by Tahltan epistemological production and often takes the form of performance interventions. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery, and Burnaby Art Gallery. In 2016, Morin was received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award outstanding achievements by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Skwxwú7mesh / Hul’q’umi’num / Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, British Columbia which is of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. Usher completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University. Her thesis, “more than just flesh: the arts as resistance and sexual empowerment,” focused on how the arts may be used as a tool to engage Indigenous youth in discussions of health and sexuality, drawing predominantly on the work of Qaggiavuut!, an Arctic performing arts group, for her case study. She is currently a PhD student in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University and has been awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoral for her research-creation work around urban Indigenous experiences within Indigenous arts collectives and other groups activating public spaces through gestures both little and big. She has been awarded the 2018 Canadian Art Writing Prize and has been lucky to develop her installation-based artistic practice through acts of love and care in collaboration with filmmaker Asinnajaq.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, a visual artist, community activist, researcher, youth-advocate and educator. For 12 years, he was the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program. Ware is currently a facilitator/designer for the Cultural Leaders Lab (Toronto Arts Council & The Banff Centre). As a visual artist, Ware works within the mediums of painting, installation and performance to challenge systemic oppression.  Ware’s work explores the spaces between and around identities; acting as provocations to our understandings of gender, sexuality and race.  His work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Gladstone Hotel, ASpace Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, SPIN Gallery and other galleries across Canada.

[This event has been postponed, details soon to follow]
Thursday 28 February, 12:30–2:30pm
Robin James