September 16, 2018
Petro Canada Park, 555 Southdown Rd., Mississauga
Events are FREE and open to the public. All are welcome.
Presented as part of The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea.
The Work of Wind: Land Book Launch
D.T. Cochrane, Tom Keefer, Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson), Christine Shaw, Anna-Sophie Springer, Adrienne Telford, Etienne Turpin, Tania Willard
September 16, 2018
Petro Canada Park, 555 Southdown Rd., Mississauga
Events are FREE and open to the public. All are welcome.
The first volume in The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea book series launches with a conversation on “this land of forces,” hosted by editors Christine Shaw, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Etienne Turpin. Seven contributors will speak about their work in the book: performance scholar Allen Weiss on the history of art as an itinerant, speculative exhibition; artist duo Pejvak on the border work of Armenian political economic realities; artist Tania Willard on Indigenous land practices born out of a lived connection to the land; and activist Tom Keefer and lawyer Adrienne Telford with D.T. Cochrane on Indigenous solidarity work and the struggle for justice.
Presented as part of The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea a site-specific exhibition, public program series, and publication platform designed to expand perspectives on climate change through artistic practices, cultural inquiry, and political mobilization.
D.T. Cochrane Through his work with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, D.T. Cochrane is providing political economic analysis to support opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion by Secwépemc land defenders.
Tom Keefer is a media creator and consultant in the field of First Nations economic development and governance.
Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson) is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living, they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with likeminded collaborators, histories, and various geographies.
Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of political economy, critical architecture, and planning. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that organize and regiment the world around us.
Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video, and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.
Christine Shaw is the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Anna-Sophie Springer is a curator, writer, editor, and director of the publishing imprint K. Verlag in Berlin. She is the co-editor, with Etienne Turpin, of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series.
Adrienne Telford is a white settler lawyer based in Toronto, Canada. She practices with the law firm Cavalluzzo LLP in the areas of Aboriginal, constitutional, labour, and human rights law, and is legal counsel to Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows First Nation).
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, founding director of anexact office, and research coordinator of User Group Inc. LLP, worker-owned cooperative building software for disaster response and environmental monitoring. With Anna-Sophie Springer, he is co-principal investigator of Reassembling the Natural.
Tania Willard, of Secwépemc and settler heritage, works within the shifting ideas around contemporary and traditional, often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Her curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-2014), co-curated with Kathleen Ritter. In 2016 Willard received the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art from the Hanatyshyn Foundation and a City of Vancouver Book Award for the catalogue Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Willard’s ongoing collaborative project BUSH Gallery is a conceptual land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges and relational art practices. Willard is an MFA candidate at UBCO Kelowna, and her current research constructs a land rights aesthetic through intuitive archival acts.
The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea is presented by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga in partnership with the City of Mississauga.
This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded in part through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
