Through painting, filmmaking, and cultural production, Toronto-based artist Abdullah Qureshi deals with personal and collective histories, traumatic pasts, and sexuality. Drawing on the autobiography, as well as curatorial and collaborative approaches, Qureshi's recent work examines formations of queer identity and resistance in Muslim migratory contexts.
The show takes both Qureshi's work and his research projects as a starting point for a visual dialogue with other artists, theorists and cultural producers that are invited to participate with their works. In personal 1:1 settings, Qureshi will meet old and recent companions that he encountered on his way from Pakistan via Europe to Canada to discuss engaged collaborations, representation and collective memories.
PROGRAMMING
Deepening the conversation around the artistic positions, Abdullah Qureshi will engage in a personal discussion with each artist. Set up in front of the specific works, the talks circle around formal aspects of the multidiciplinary exhibition as well as around indivual and shared ambitions. Please also refer to our website for updates on prorgamming and Covid requirements.
MARCH 11, 6 pm - 6.45 pm
MEETING KASPALE
With Syowia Kyambi, Abdullah is discussing biographical histories and artistic developments in context of the politics of the time as well as its legacy today. What is remembered, what is archived, and how do we see the world anew, questions Kyambi who is visually interrogating our histories, the representation of identity and the nuances in our relationships to each other and the world we live in.
MARCH 13, 4 pm - 4.45 pm
THE IDENTITY OF SCULPTURES
Abdullah and Gloria Zein met eleven years back while studying Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. They both share a generous approach to scale and color allowing the artworks a spontanous, almost performative, character. Through a dialogue about texture, density and structure, both their artworks press pause on personal developments and suggest a new - temporary - form of reality.
MARCH 13, 5.30 pm - 6.15 pm
THE POLITICS OF THE HUMAN TOUCH
The body as an important canvas for physical trauma and external projections, plays a central role in Natasha Jozi’s work. With political and social movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter, where the human body is navigating, redefining and fighting to protect the boundaries and sanctity of its space, her performance also explores the politics of the human touch.
MARCH 17, 6 pm - 7.15 pm
BLACKING OUT THE CANON
When Tasnim Baghdadi is “blacking out the canon” she questions hegemonial modes of thinking and canonic knowledge productions in art history, philosophy and religion. Her artistic practice subverts western modernisms through a re-appropriation of abstraction. In her conversation with Abdullah, both theorists will discuss disruptions of colonial continuities through knowledge as well as find out about the invisible, forgotten, folded and yet hidden aspects of artistic truth.
MARCH 19, 6 pm - 6.45 pm
ON MAGICAL REALISM
Just like Abdullah, Sara Khan was raised in Lahore (even though born in Birmingham) and adds a female gaze on the patriachal system in Pakistan - and beyond. In that formal, painterly conversation, they find beauty in mythology, visual symbolism and magical realism.
