Friday 26 April
9°C and Scattered Clouds
Another milestone: Agnes is closed to the public as we prepare for Agnes Reimagined. Stay tuned for plans for off-site programming!
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In this new series, big topics relating to current Agnes exhibitions are discussed in a casual and accessible format.
This program has been postponed. We will be sharing the new date and time shortly.
What is contemporary art and can we even fit it into a simple definition? Emelie Chhangur, Agnes’s newly appointed Director and Curator, presents concepts of processual production and residency style ways of working, transdisciplinary collaboration, and community collaboration and engagement as a form of contemporary art practice today and its bearing on the art institutional practices of tomorrow.
Curator, writer, and artist, Emelie Chhangur, is the newly appointed Director and Curator of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This appointment follows a significant curatorial career at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). At AGYU, she led the reorientation of the gallery to become a civic, community-facing, ethical space driven by social process and intersectional collaboration; she founded the gallery’s residency program and received 25 OAAG awards for her contributions in writing, publishing, exhibition-making, public and education programming. Over the past 20 years, Chhangur has emerged as a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada and is celebrated nationally and internationally for her process-based, participatory curatorial practice, the commissioning of complex works across all media, and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside the gallery context.
Distinguishing herself as a cultural worker dedicated to questioning the social and civic role of the public institutions of art, Chhangur has developed a curatorially-engaged approach to working across cultural, aesthetic, and social differences through a practice she calls “in-reach”—a concept that has since transformed engaged institutional practice in the arts across Canada. In 2019, she won the Ontario Association of Art Galleries’ inaugural BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) Changemaker Award and in 2020, she won the prestigious The Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence.
