Menu

Opening Hours

Wednesday-Saturday

12-5pm

Free Admission

Follow Or Gallery

Visit Us

236 Pender St East,
Vancouver, BC

Map

On View

Lys Divine Ndemeye and Colin Berg Mbugua, Daylight, 2024, concept drawing, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists.

Sustaining Apertures

Lys Divine Ndemeye and Colin Berg Mbugua

Until 06 July 2024

  • Event

     Sustaining Apertures: Artist Talk

    04 May, 2024

    • Stay in touch

    • orgallery.org
      or@orgallery.org
      T. +1 604.683.7395

    Or Gallery is funded by

    Symposia

    Video Documentation

    Bodies, Borders, Fields

    November 22–
    November 24, 2019

    Design by Sameer Farooq

    Convened by: Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee

    Participants: Lillian Allen, Christina Battle, Raymond Boisjoly, Deanna Bowen, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Keyon Gaskin, Che Gossett, Sean D. Henry-Smith, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Steffani Jemison, Aisha Sasha John, Jessica Lynne, Charmaine Nelson, M Nourbese Philip, Tina Post, Krys Verrall, Kandis Williams, Bear Witness

    Location

    Toronto Media Arts Centre

    32 Lisgar Street
    Toronto, ON
    M6J 0C9

    Website

    A “simultaneous conversation” took place on August 16, 1967 between seven speakers in Toronto and New York with the cooperation of Bell Telephone Company, the CBC and artscanada magazine (formerly Canadian Art). This cross-border conversation was recorded and published in that year’s October issue of artscanada, which was, dedicated to “black” as a concept, painterly medium, symbol as well as socio-political category, expression and status.

    Convened by Denise Ryner in collaboration with Yaniya Lee, Bodies Borders Fields is a free, public symposium that re-imagines the 1967 conversation about “blackness” with particular attention to blackness and fugitivity as represented in critical art practices today. Responding to an absence of black experience in the conversation between the 1967 panelists—an absence that has since been examined by writers Fred Moten, Krys Verrall and others—Bodies Borders Fields will dislocate the original panel discussion to contemporary contexts and representations of black and blackness in sound, performance and visual culture with respect to black social life and expression.

    Bodies Borders Fields supports ongoing and future discussions of blackness as an ever-shifting, circulating and transforming factor for the survival and destabilization of colonial systems and institutions. All are welcome, especially those who recognize their own stake in contemporary readings of black and blackness as both signifier and lived-experience.

    All roundtables, talks and panels are free and open to the public.

    Bodies Borders and Fields design by Sameer Farooq.

    With Support From

    Bodies, Borders, Fields Documentation

    Video

    Texts, Transcripts, Essays

    • Author(s): Krys Verrall and M NourbeSe Philip with Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee

      Download PDF (279.11 KB)

      Panel: The Black Aesthetic Revisited - Transcript

      Group conversation with Krys Verrall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Yaniya Lee and Denise Ryner

      Background to the Bodies Borders Fields symposium and the 1967 artscanada panel. Verall discusses her research into cultural production amongst African-Canadian activists in Halifax during the late 1960s and the 1967 artscanada panel that happened simultaneously in Toronto and New York.

      Philip recounts the transnational networks, causes and development of political activism amongst the 1960s, 70s and 80s black diaspora in the UK, the Caribbean and Canada and how this climate lead to demands for Canadian cultural institutions to be accountable to black communities.

    • Download PDF (37.99 MB)

      arts/canada No. 113, October 1967

      A “simultaneous conversation” took place on August 16, 1967 between seven speakers in Toronto and New York with the cooperation of Bell Telephone Company, the CBC and artscanada magazine (formerly Canadian Art). This cross-border conversation was recorded and published in that year’s October issue of artscanada which was dedicated to ‘black’ as a concept, painterly medium, symbol as well as socio-political category, expression and status.

      The 1967 artscanada panel documented here contributed to debates on flattening black and blackness from which the Bodies Borders Fields symposium departs.

    • Author(s): Julia Bryan-Wilson

      Download PDF (1.40 MB)

      Keeping House with Louise Nevelson

      This article examines how Louise Nevelson’s Dream House sculptures (1972-1973) simultaneously produced and disrupted notions of domesticity. As a series of alternative or non-normative dwellings, the Dream Houses are spaces that indicate a broader potential to reinvent the home. Nevelson’s wooden, allblack Dream House sculptures reconfigure our understanding of gendered domestic work – that is, the tending to physical space and matter around us, as well as the affective claims we make about our familiars, not least, claims Bryan-Wilson, queer or otherwise expansive forms of kinship around gender, sexuality, and race.

      This article references the debates in the 1967 panel, to differentiate Nevelson’s idealization around ‘black’ from those of her peers.