Queer Futurities: holding area, gathering place
Open Space, Victoria, BC - To July 23
Queer Futurities: holding area, gathering place is a group show featuring the work of 12 artists and coordinators. Holding area is the exhibition; media include audiovisual installation, textiles, beading, painting and performance. Gathering place includes a number of performance works, a weaving workshop and a workshop hosted by Victoria’s first Community Fridge.
Dani Neira (they/she), the project curator at Open Space and an honours student in art history and visual studies at UVic, explains that “the two parts exist … in dialogue with one another. I wanted the community programming of gathering place to stand alone and alongside the exhibition of holding area. Community programming is often deemed as a less-important extension to the exhibition, so by giving it its own ‘part,’ I aim to centre the importance of community-building, gathering, and multiple levels of access in this project.”
Neira writes that Queer Futurities “aims to create entry-points and fissures in the systems which fail us. Consider how cultural hegemony reaches into how we think about time, place, archive, and community; time is often thought of through the lens of capitalism and colonial linearity, place is often tied to ownership, the archive has historically privileged the documentation of white, heterosexual, and institutional perspectives, and intersectional complexity of- ten goes unacknowledged in conversations around community. The artworks, performances, and workshops in QF offer a dialogue or glimpse into alternative ways of being and thinking … beyond these hegemonic conceptions.”
Participants in this group show are Margaret August, Edzi’u, keiko Hart, Romi Kim, Estraven Lupino Smith, Nicole Mandryk, Kitt Peacock, Cassia Powell, Arezu Salamzadeh, Kendall Yan and Florence Yee.
