we.school
A. Wilfrid Johns Gallery
University of Victoria, MacLaurin Building (Wing A)
Artist Residency: September 22 – 28, 10am – 4 pm
Exhibition: September 29 – October 9
Artist talk: Sunday, September 22, 2 – 3 pm
The talk will be in the gallery and online. You can access the zoom link here.
“The schools we go to are reflections of the societies that created them.” Assata Shakur
Our relationships to ‘school’ have lasting impacts on our lived experiences and social histories. Schools play a significant role in the operations of power, reflecting what is normalised and what is othered. School is where we are first made into social subjects, where ideas and behaviours are inscribed onto our bodies and psyches through epistemic domination, forming the foundation of internalised hierarchies. To use Paulo Freire’s words, “There’s no such thing as neutral education.”
This residency is a collaborative exchange between transdisciplinary artists Golboo Amani and Anna Jane McIntyre. The residency will prioritise joyously unsettling participants through explorations of non-hierarchical negotiation-centred unschooling play. Participants will be invited to trade what they know, question and challenge the rules of the game, steep in the practice of deep listening and unpack the lingering legacies and the present and future potentials of the institutions we call school. “What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognise our sameness.” – Audre Lorde,“Learning from the 60s”, Malcolm X weekend celebrations, February 1982, Harvard University
Bio
Golboo Amani is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator and curator best known for their performance and social practice works. Amani produces sites for aesthetic intervention by utilizing ready-made and familiar social engagements as a point of entry in their practice. Amani’s work often examines relationships to learning by addressing the conditions of knowledge production that render epistemic violence as invisible, insignificant and benign. As a result, Amani works often experiment with collective agency and egalitarian epistemology by producing sites where one gets to play with pedagogy.
Amani’s work has been presented their work nationally and internationally in venues including the Toronto Biennial of Art, New York University, Creative Time Summit, Art Gallery of Ontario, Articule, XPACE Artist-Run Centre, Hemispheric Institute, Union Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Rats9 Gallery, Rhubarb Festival, FADO Emerging Artist Series, TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City), 221A Artist-Run Centre, and the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art. Curatorial projects include; 7A*11D International Festival of Performance Art, PUSH.PULL: QTBIPOC Cabaret and Performance Art, 7A*MD8: Performance for the Camera, Sidewalk Screenings.
Anna Jane McIntyre is a visual artist-parent with a practice combining listening, drawing, thinking, doing, looking, breathing, sharing, telling, being, non-being, shape-shifting, $5-improv-benevolent-capitalism and microactivism. Anna’s work investigates how people perceive, create and maintain their notions-of-self, belonging and culture through behaviour and visual cues.
Projects may incorporate giant emojis, feminist-foosball-tables, community workshops, parade floats, commercial signage, thinking forests, urban ecology forest-school cahiers prioritising BIPOC children-of-all-ages, Speaker’s corners, love-letter-services, time-travelling-soundscapes-mapping-abstract-narratives and inaccurate portraiture.
Anna’s projects are an aesthetic expression of Afropresentism that combines her Trinidadian, British, adoptive-Canadian cultural influences. Anna’s work acknowledges the past-present-future, in joyous response to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s prompt Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Research
The exhibition is part of a research project (Artistic approaches to anti-racism and anti-oppression: Artists and university students engaging in transformative action in a campus gallery)* conducted by Natasha S. Reid, Natalie LeBlanc, and Michelle Wiebe (Assistant Professors, Art Education, Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction). This research is investigating how participatory artistic practices can assist in situating a university gallery as a community site for learning about ant-racism and anti-oppression. If you choose to contribute to the artwork in this exhibition, your contributions will be included in the documentation, analysis, and dissemination of the research.
As part of the research, unidentifiable photographs, drawings, and videos of participants will be taken throughout the exhibition. If an identifiable image is accidentally taken, the image will be edited to remove identifying information (i.e., blurring, blocking, or cropping faces) or deleted.
The researchers are also looking for individuals who are interested in participating in a 30- to 45-min. interview or responding to a questionnaire, which will examine their experiences with the exhibition.
You can learn more about this research project by clicking the button below.
If you have any questions about the research project or Golboo & Anna’s residency, please contact Natasha (natashareid@uvic.ca or 250-721-7896), Natalie (natalieleblanc@uvic.ca or 250-721-7895), or Michelle (mxw@uvic.ca or 250-721-7894).
If you are interested in participating in Golboo & Anna’s residency, please download the consent form by clicking the button below. After you fill out the form, please contact the research assistant, Shadi Moalem Bajestani, and email it to her at (shadimoalem@uvic.ca).
This residency is part of the Artistic approaches to anti-racism and anti-oppression: Artists and university students engaging in transformative action in a campus gallery which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
