The artists Nicolas Fleming, Cindy Mochizuki, Lisa Myers, Laura Pitkanen, Camille Turner and Alize Zorlutuna in Fugitive Rituals examine belief systems embedded within institutional architecture and ask how we make changes with care to the systems that we have lived with for a very long time. The exhibition, as a discursive platform for a series of activations, offers intentional rituals to give palliative care to old systems that no longer work; to grieve and mourn what is lost; and to project into a speculative but collective future grounded in care and ecological considerations. Approaching the exhibition as an iterative ritual itself, where repeated acts of building, installing, disseminating, viewing and deinstalling transform the site, we might see the possibilities for escape from old colonial systems and seek sustenance through practicing each artist’s intentional ritual. The work in this exhibition engages with waste produced from previous exhibitions as well as selected objects from Agnes’s significant collection of cultural belongings as ways to consider ecological and relational concerns in art and exhibition-making.

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