Featuring project descriptions, a curatorial statement by Letters & Handshakes, artist biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout.
This micropublication was produced on the occasion of Collective Welfare, Circuit 5/5 of Take Care, February 12–March 11, 2018.
Steven Eastwood
Sheena Hoszko
Carolyn Lazard
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Take Care’s fifth circuit, Collective Welfare, glimpses typically sequestered and private spaces of care. The projects in this circuit juxtapose three sites of the institutional mediation of care: hospital, prison, hospice. These sites offer a reminder that the welfare state, in all its ambivalence, is a decisive front in the crisis of care. Reframing practices of individualized care as fundamentally social matters, this circuit works across video, photography, social media, and temporary architecture to bear witness to care’s pace, failure, and stratifications. Collective Welfare circulates images of the entanglement of the chronically ill body and the biomedical industrial complex; materially fabricates the incompatibility of care and incarceration, and shifts perspective on mass incarceration as symptom, and strategy, of care crisis; and screens moving images of dying, generated from an intimate hospice setting, trialling new ways of taking care with death aesthetically. Collective Welfare reveals the persistence of alternative habits of care and relations of interdependency, from the hospice tradition to prison abolition to communities of independent study. Closing Take Care, this circuit also revisits a hypothesis with which this exhibition series opened: that care is a vital conceptual device for a process of political recomposition that would deepen linkages across contexts and conflicts in the spheres of social reproduction and ecology.
Beverly Bain teaches in Women and Gender Studies in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She has been teaching in the university environment for the past twelve years, and currently teaches and researches in the areas of diasporic sexualities, black queer diasporic studies, sexual assault and violence against women, gender, colonialism, transnationalism, and anti-capitalism. Bain has been an anti-racist, anti-violence, feminist activist for over thirty years and was the Executive Director of the National Action Committee on The Status of Women, Canada’s largest feminist organization between 1992-1997.
Joshua Clover is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Davis. He is the author of six books, including poetry, cultural history, and political theory; his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. His most recent books are the poetry collection Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015) and Riot.Strike.Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016), a political economy of insurrection and renarration of capital’s history. He edits Studies in Revolution and Literature for Palgrave Macmillan along with Bruno Bosteels.
Steven Eastwood is an artist and filmmaker whose practice spans documentary film, installation-based moving image, media arts, and theory. He holds a PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and teaches film practice at Queen Mary University of London. He has held Visiting Lecturer positions at Harvard University, University of Greenwich, and University of Buffalo. His feature-length film, Island, premiered at BFI London Film Festival in 2017 and the sibling multichannel video installation, The Interval and the Instant, was presented at Fabrica (Brighton). His feature film Buried Land was an official selection at the Tribeca, Moscow, Sarajevo, and Mumbai film festivals. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Fabrica (Brighton), QUT Gallery (Brisbane), Globe Gallery (Newcastle), KK Projects (New Orleans), ICA (London).
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien'kehá:ka territory. Her practice and research explores the politics of contemporary art practice, specifically focusing on experimental and expanded cinema, and contemporary media arts. Her writings have been published in Contemp+rary,C Magazine, Critical Signals, The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Fuse Magazine, and MICE Magazine, among others.
Sheena Hoszko is a sculptor, anti-prison organizer, and settler living and working in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien'kehá:ka territory. Her art practice examines the power dynamics of geographic and architectural sites, and is informed by her family’s experiences with incarceration and the military. Selected solo exhibitions include Centre Clark and La Centrale (Montreal), A Space (Toronto), Artspace (Peterborough), The New Gallery (Calgary) and Forest City Gallery (London), with upcoming projects at articule (Montreal). She is also an avid sci-fi/speculative fiction fan.
Jakob Jakobsen is an artist and organizer who recently opened the HOSPITAL PRISON UNIVERSITY Archive, Copenhagen. He has developed the Antihistory project (2012-ongoing) investigating the Antiuniversity of London, established in 1968, as well as the New Experimental College established in Copenhagen in 1962. He cofounded the trade union Unge Kunstnere og Kunstformidlere (UKK) [Young Artists and Art Mediators], Copenhagen (2002), was Professor at Funen Art Academy, Odense (2006-2012), and was part of the Copenhagen Free University (2001-2007). He edited Wages for Students (2016) and contributed to Contestations: Learning from Critical Experiments in Education (ed. Tim Ivison and Tom Vandeputte, 2013). With The Antiuniversity Research Project, he participated in And And And, dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel). Jakobsen lives and works in Copenhagen and London.
Carolyn Lazard is an artist working in video, performance, and text. Her work engages collective practice to address the ecology of care, dependency, and visibility. Lazard has presented work in various spaces including Light Industry, Cleopatra’s, Recess, Anthology Film Archives, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Slought Foundation, the New Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has published writing in the Brooklyn Rail and Mousse Magazine and is currently writing an Accessibility Guide for Common Practice. She is a founding member of Canaries, a healing and arts collective of chronically ill women and femmes. Lazard holds a BA from Bard College and lives in Philadelphia where she is completing her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yaniya Lee’sinterdisciplinary research draws on the work of Black Studies scholars to question critical reading practices and reconsider Canada’s art histories. From 2012-2015 she hosted the Art Talks MTL podcast, a series of long-form interviews with art workers in Montreal. She is a founding collective member of MICE Magazine and a new member of the EMILIA-AMALIA working group. She is the 2017-2018 writer-in-residence at Gallery 44 and currently works as the Associate Editor at Canadian Art Magazine.
Letters & Handshakes is a collaboration of Greig de Peuter (Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) and Christine Shaw (Blackwood Gallery and Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga).
Robyn Maynard is a Black feminist who has spent years documenting racist and gender-based state violence. She has spent the better part of the last decade doing frontline harm-reduction outreach work in Montreal, and continues to provide training for health and social service providers on the harms created by systemic racism, criminal laws, and stigmatization. A harsh critic of systemic racism in all of its forms, Maynard has been involved in grassroots organizing against police violence for over a decade. Most recently, she helped co-found Montréal Noir, a Black activist group committed to combating anti-Black racism in Quebec. Additionally, she is a part of the Black Indigenous Harm Reduction Alliance, where she co-coordinates harm reduction education for incarcerated women. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, released by Fernwood Publishing in 2017.
Wanda Nanibush is the inaugural Curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, located in Southern Ontario. Nanibush has a Master’s degree in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Her curatorial credits include the exhibitions Rita Letendre: Fire & Light (AGO), Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (AGO), Sovereign Acts II (Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery), and the award-winning KWE: The Work of Rebecca Belmore (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery), among many others. Nanibush has published widely on the subject of Indigenous art as well as women’s issues, and is currently at work on her first book, Violence No More: The Rise of Indigenous Women.
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and former lawyer who lives in the space-time of the city of Toronto. Author of five books of poetry, one novel, and three collections of essays, her most recent work of poetry, Zong!, is a genre-breaking, book-length poem which engages with law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. Her most recent collection of essays is BlanK. Winner of many awards including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships and the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award, she is also a Dora Award finalist for her play Coups and Calypsos.
Jeff Reinhart works as a registered nurse in the LGBTQ Primary Care program at Sherbourne Health Centre in Toronto. There, the majority of his clients are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and other queer-identified people, and he provides nursing care to Sherbourne’s HIV Clinic—a low barrier, drop-in-based clinic for people living with HIV. He collaborates with community members and clinicians from across Canada through research, community mobilization, advocacy, and clinical care, on issues ranging from transition-related surgery to HIV medication access and delivery. He is a volunteer at Moss Park overdose prevention site in Toronto.
An award-winning poet, Juliana Spahr’s most recent book is That Winter the Wolf Came from Commune Editions. She edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman, the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people, and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. With David Buuck, she wrote Army of Lovers (City Lights, 2013). She has edited many anthologies, including: A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011) with Stephanie Young; Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006) with Joan Retallack; and American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) with Claudia Rankine.
Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Mardin, Turkey. She is Associate Professor of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University and contributor to Silent University, a pedagogical platform for refugees and migrants. She was a visiting Professor of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a past Art, Culture and Technology Program Fellow in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at MIT. She is currently researching the Pearl River Delta as “territorial sea” (M+ Design Trust Research Fellowship, Hong Kong) and leading socio-spatial discursive research on refugee camps in Turkey and Palestine. She has participated in multiple biennials and triennials, including Istanbul (2007, 2015), Lisbon (2013), Montreal (2014), Oslo (2016), and Venice (2016). Tan is a lead author on Cities for the International Panel on Social Progress (ISPS).
Image credit: Carolyn Lazard, The Undercommons (detail), 2017. From the series In Sickness and Study, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Blackwood Gallery.
Design: Matthew Hoffman
Printing: Thistle Printing
To order any of our publications, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: michael.dirisio@utoronto.ca
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The Blackwood Gallery is grateful for additional support for Collective Welfare from the Graduate Expansion Fund, Department of Visual Studies, and Women and Gender Studies (UTM).
The Interval and the Instant is a multiscreen video installation commissioned by Fabrica Gallery (Brighton, UK) as part of the programme Into That Good Night, a five-year initiative to generate positive change in awareness of death and dying.
Funding for staff support was made possible through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations Graduate Internship program, Department of Canadian Heritage. The Canadian Museums Association administers the program on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
