“I want to move away from thinking about art writing. Not as an analytical tool, but as a relational one, and not as a review that explains the object in question, but as a way to extend the work by seriously confronting my love for it, why I love it.”

Join The Writing Table at the Or Gallery for a discussion and workshop with Montreal-based writer and curator Nasrin Himada. Himada will discuss their new writing project, For Many Returns, which looks to the concept of return as a potent political and personal gesture. Return is figured in manifold forms: to return to histories long forgotten, to return to practices of refusal, to return to the land, to return as a process of decolonization. The first iteration of this project, published in the online journal contemptorary, examined the role of love in art and writing; the limits of language in articulating the personal, experiential, and embodied forms of knowledge that love generates; and the political struggles against and with which love enacts. The discussion will be followed by a writing exercise that engages the relation between intuition and intention.

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The Writing Table is a series of arts-writing talks and workshops held in the Or Bookstore and dedicated to investigating the shifting relationship and potentialities between writing and visual art practice. The series brings together experienced arts writers as facilitators in a discussion and writing workshop aimed at cultivating new voices in arts writing, exploring alternative modes of writing about art, and examining writing as a vehicle and as a process for thinking about and producing art. From art criticism, to curatorial writing, to writing as artistic practice, the Writing Table considers the ways in which cogent and critically engaged writing plays a fundamental role in furthering arts discourse and in fostering community. The Writing Table is open to individuals from all backgrounds and experience levels, from recent graduates to writers working in other fields who are interested in the visual arts.

Programmed by Weiyi Chang. Weiyi’s curatorial residency is supported by the Early Career Development Program funded by the BC Arts Council.