Over the course of spring-summer 2021, a group of independent curators met over a series of working sessions to curate a public lightbox program on the University of Toronto Mississauga campus for the 2021-2022 academic year. Each bringing their own positional experiences, pedagogical influences, professional training, research interests, and methodological approaches, the curatorial consortium fosters a unique connective and dialogical space in which to hold commonalities, in an effort to think together through negotiating differences. The resulting program, Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, responds to this exercise in collaborative composition while honouring the independent thinking that makes group work possible—at a moment when the need to protect independent thought and academic freedom (within and beyond the university) is both palpable and deeply urgent. 

Indeed, the politics of participation, collaboration and expression within the consortium have shifted and continue to evolve, especially after the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Council voted to censure the University of Toronto for the Administration’s failure “to resolve concerns regarding academic freedom stemming from a hiring scandal in the Faculty of Law” in 2020. In light of these developments, the consortium considered this collaboration as an opportunity to affirm the fundamental individual and collective right to speak truth to power, through independent thought, freedom of expression, collective gathering, cultural sovereignty, and peaceful protest—values espoused by the artists and artworks presented by the participants.

Across the six image sets, artists and curators respond to absences and presences, visibilities and invisibilities, encounters and fissures through public artworks on a university campus recently reopened following COVID-19 lockdowns. Conceived as a series of “crossings,” the works in the lightboxes point to multiple forms of translation, mediation, transgression, fluidity, turbulence, and attunement—for while a crossing can be an intersection, a passage, a barrier (a space of conflict, discord, or friction), it is also a meeting point for routes and flows that might converge, act upon one another, produce interdependence, and generate new iterations of possibility. Each distinct curatorial proposition presented in the lightbox series functions as a kind of crossing, asking that its viewer traverse and encounter critical questions, unsettled memories, and the planetary implications of our living realities. Revisited routinely in public space, the lightboxes bear an architecture of return, pause, reconsideration, iteration.

Across the six-part lightbox series Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, each curator activates a Respondent Program that brings artists into dialogue with an image set.

Attunement Sessions offer pedagogic tools to assist audiences with “tuning-in” to each image set in ways that reach beyond solely seeing. Each of these sessions provides a series of performative instruction by way of social media that are situated within specific historical and spatial contexts. The program’s intention is to guide observers by means of embodiment, perception, texture, joy, meditation, encounter, touch, intimacy, sound, intuition, or other senses so often dismissed in viewing and archival habits. Six interdisciplinary practitioners have been commissioned to respond to a particular image set with an assemblage of prompts that challenge viewers to open to new ways of understanding what we “see.” This exercise reveals multisensory and resonant methods of engaging these works through multiple forms of connection. Like Black feminist theorist Tina Campt describes, to make contact with an image one must attune to certain frequencies of encounter that aren’t always available in our normal register.11Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). These sessions and their varied attunements incite just that, fostering participation that confronts and reaches beyond our familiar modes of encounter.