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On display in the Screening Room at NAC
Running from 27 October – 18 December
Wed – Fri 12nn-5pm & Sat 12nn-4pm

In partnership with V-tape, NAC is pleased to present a selection from The Curatorial Incubator V.16: Living in Hope video program – a series of curated short films from V-tape’s catalogue responding to the theme of Living In Hope. The series will rotate every two weeks.

NAC is presenting four of the eight total curatorial programs in V.16, each featured in The Screening Room for two weeks at a time. Each program runs 30 min in length and is guest-curated through the V-tape’s Curatorial Incubator program.

V-tape’s Curatorial Incubator program provides annual workshops, mentorship and exhibition opportunities to emerging curators. A public call for proposals is circulated annually and participants are selected based on their proposals. Established in 2002, the Curatorial Incubator has worked with more than 50 emerging curators to date; many of them have gone on to establish themselves in prominent curatorial, administrative, or artistic careers.

Program 5

// On display from 27 Oct – 6 Nov 2021

The Age of Endarkenment

Curated by Karina Griffith
Featuring work by Dana Inkster, Thirza Cuthand, Penny Mccann, Karina Griffiths, and Abdi Osman

What if darkness were not the opposite of light, but instead could do and be everything light can do and be, and much more? This programme looks at moving images through Cynthia Dillard’s concept of “endarkenment” (a response to Enlightenment that imagines a new world order centring Black feminist thought). These short films and videos flip the switch to turn darkness and mystery into something that can be illuminating, broadening and blazing.

The program seeks to find filmic texts that reflect endarkening not only in content but in form, through reversals and bold contrasts in their treatment of sound and cinematography, light and dark.

Karina Griffith is a visual art, film scholar and curator based in Berlin and Toronto. Her moving image, textile and paper works explore the themes of fear and fantasy, often focusing on how they relate to belonging.

Program 6

// On display from 10 Nov – 20 Nov 2021

It could be a good day.
It needs to be treated carefully.

Curated by Robin Alex McDonald
Featuring work by Dana Claxton, Gary Kibbins, Jorge Lozano, Rokshad Nourdeh

It could be a good day. It needs to be treated carefully showcases works in the Vtape collection that present hope as “an inherently risky, fragile project.”  Each of the four works present narratives of hope anchored in a fragile object – a bowl, a doorway, a butterfly, and a line, respectively. Highlighting precariousness as a fundamental feature of hope’s structures, the underlying question of the program asks: how might we hold out for hope without falling victim to forms of “cruel optimism”? Poetic and anxiety-provoking, desirous yet wary, these four works invite us for a walk along the tenuous line between hope and dejection.

Robin Alex McDonald is an academic, independent curator, and arts writer.

// On display from 24 Nov – 4 Dec 2021

Performative Faiths

Curated by Camila Salcedo
Featuring work by Guillermina Buzio, Nela Ochoa, and Julieta Maria

Popular beliefs and santos that keep death at the forefront are embedded in the social fabric across Latin America. The artists’ works selected for this series reinterpret the rituals of these faith-based traditions. In the process of making consistent, Guillermina Buzio examines the tradition of altars dedicated to those who have suffered tragic deaths throughout Argentina. Nela Ochoa fictionalizes her own experience of faith-based rituals while growing up in Venezuela by subverting Catholic gestures in que en pez descanse, or “may [they] rest in fish,” a pun on the popular myth that if one bathes in the ocean on Holy Friday one will turn into a fish. In Exercises in Faith: Embrace, Julieta Maria questions sacrificial offerings by literally taking the life of a fish by intimately embracing it with her hands. Through their performative actions, the three artists explore popular traditions that give people hope in the face of death in Latin America.

Camila Salcedo is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, community facilitator and arts educator based in Toronto.

// On display from 9 Dec – 18 Dec 2021

Love as rupturous as I know it to be

Curated by Shalon Webber-Heffernan
Featuring work by Ursula Biemann, Shelley Niro, prOphecy sun, and Sharon Isaac.

Love as rupturous as I know it to be ponders caring otherwise, prioritizing action while envisioning a radical unbounded love. Intuitively, instinctively, and uninterested in aesthetic distance, I selected works that spoke to me viscerally. I was guided by a desire to explore relationships that exceed those that are strictly between humans to include those that exist between plants, animals, and things, and merge into minerals, energy, land, stars and waters.

The title of this series is an excerpt from an essay by Karyn Recollet that imagines cosmic kinship and imagines the potent magic of dark matter—the vibrant power of imagining elsewise. These videos symbolize an ethos of generosity—a central tenant for intimate practices of care in a world wildly in need of renewal. They simultaneously index the grave responsibility necessary if ongoing flourishing of life is to be sustained. Understanding that all our complex and fragile interactions are inextricably linked requires acknowledging our dependency, collective need, grief, and reciprocity as basic elements of being. Transformation calls for a rebirth of the world as we know it and demands we are brave enough to face the troubling vulnerability and shattering affective burden of living in hope.

Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan is a curator and doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at York University. Her work broadly examines feminist performance projects that respond to issues surrounding borderlands, space, and disappearance throughout the Americas.

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