WHAT MESSAGES DO WE NEED TO BROADCAST TO OUR NATION(S) AND RELATIONS NOW?
Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power is a polyvocal art project initiated by Constance Hockaday that takes up and subverts the model of the Presidential Address or Transmission to the Nation. The Blackwood has commissioned 21 artists, thinkers, performers, and writers to create audio addresses that perform power in new and different ways, and together compose a rousing collection of imaginative proposals for the leadership we need in this moment of global crisis and possibility. Inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Depression-era radio broadcasts called the “Fireside Chats” as a framework for speaking frankly and directly to the people, Artists-in-Presidents replaces the one-man hero story that plagues our histories and governing bodies around the globe, and complicates calls for unity by asking, “What messages do we need to broadcast to our nation(s) and relations now?”
Today, human and non-human citizens of this earth are faced with the disastrous social and environmental fallout of global capitalism and settler colonialism, with the COVID-19 pandemic only compounding the existing disparities in our communities. While we reject the Americanized FDR-era vision of unity in favour of a recognition of the complexities of global and globalized struggles, it is certain that we live in a comparable moment of crisis and possibility. During this period of political rupture, economic downturn, and global uncertainty, this project asks: What does it look like when artists assume authority of our collective future? What other modes of power become possible?
About the Project
Initiated by Hockaday in 2020, a previous iteration of Artists-in-Presidents was presented alongside the 2020 US presidential election campaign, produced in partnership with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and Stanford Live Arts. Artists-In-Presidents: Fireside Chats for 2020brought together fifty artists to assume authority over our collective future and to address the nation over radio, podcast, social media, and in a virtual gallery. Now, commissioned in 2021 with the support of the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power continues to expand and reimagine vernaculars and aesthetics of power with the bodies and voices of brilliant thinkers, artists, writers, performers, and musicians—calling on them to assume authority over our collective future. This iteration brings together artists from across Turtle Island, England, Bahrain, Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, envisioning new local and global propositions for leadership.
With the support of the Blackwood, Hockaday offers all Artists-In-Presidents access to professional speechwriters and technical support in creating their unique presidential addresses and portraits. For Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, 21 audio addresses and presidential portraits from artists as leaders will be released every Friday from August 6 to December 17, 2021 here and at artistsinpresidents.com.
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Add your voice to Artists-in-Presidents by creating your own Transmission To Power! For further information about how to participate, please check out this article on our Reader.
Outro Message to Artists-In-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, 07:20
The Outro Message is a soundscape bringing together messages from across the 21 episodes, and new reflections from contributors on their participation in the project. In this immersive composition, voices from throughout Artists-In-Presidents speak to the challenges of performing power, the local contexts and conditions underpinning their messages, and the urgency to reimagine leadership.
Produced and composed by Olivia Bradley-Skill.
Excerpted clips from transmissions and interviews by Raji Aujla, Roy Dib, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Emily Johnson, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), Raqs Media Collective, Fariha Róisín, Adrian Stimson, Melati Suryodarmo, Paulo Tavares, Françoise Vergès, Ravyn Wngz.
Aug 06, 2021 – Dec 17, 2021
Past
Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power
21 audio addresses from artists as leaders
Released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021
Initiated by Constance Hockaday
Featuring: Esra’a Al Shafei, d’bi.young anitafrika, Raji Aujla, Roy Dib, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Kevin Gotkin, Luis Jacob, Emily Johnson, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Ramin Mazhar, Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge), Raqs Media Collective, Fariha Róisín, Adrian Stimson, Melati Suryodarmo, Paulo Tavares, Françoise Vergès, Romily Alice Walden, Ravyn Wngz
An excerpt of the Outro Message to Artists-In-Presidents: Transmissions to Power. Listen to the full message in the audio player above.
Portrait Gallery
Welcome Message
In this Welcome Message, Hockaday outlines the central concerns of Artist-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power: Who has the power to reimagine leadership? What would it look like if artists assumed authority over our collective future? What if we all joined in this mission?
Constance Hockaday is a queer Chilean-American from the US/Mexico Border. She is a director and visual artist who creates immersive social sculptures on urban waterways. She has worked with the Floating Neutrinos since 2001, and collaborated with Swoon’s Swimming Cities projects, sailing floating sculptures along the Hudson, Mississippi, and the Adriatic Sea (2006–09). In 2011, she created The Boatel, a floating art hotel in New York’s Far Rockaways made of refurbished salvaged boats—an effort to reconnect New Yorkers to their waterfront. Her 2014 piece All These Darlings and Now Us highlighted the displacement of San Francisco’s queer community: more than 1000 people watched peep show performances on a raft of retrofitted sailboats featuring artists from two recently shuttered iconic queer businesses. Hockaday holds an MFA in Social Practice and MA in Conflict Resolution. She is also a Senior TED Fellow and an artist-in-residence at The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA.
Esra'a Al Shafei is a Bahraini human rights activist and founder of Majal.org, a network of digital platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This work includes Mideast Tunes, a web and mobile application for independent musicians in the MENA who use music as a tool for social justice advocacy; Ahwaa.org, a discussion tool for Arab LGBTQ+ youth which leverages game mechanics to protect and engage its community; and Migrant-Rights.org, the primary resource on the plight of migrant workers in the Gulf region.
Al Shafei was a 2011 Senior TED Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. In 2017, she was elected to the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit which hosts Wikipedia. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Access Now, an international non-profit dedicated to an open and free Internet.
Al Shafei is the recipient of the Berkman Award from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society for "outstanding contributions to the Internet and its impact on society over the last decade"; the Monaco Media Prize, which acknowledges innovative uses of media for the betterment of humanity; and the Most Courageous Media award from Free Press Unlimited. In 2014, she received the Human Rights Tulip Prize, awarded annually to organizations or individuals that support human rights in innovative ways. She is the 2018 recipient of the Global Trailblazer Award from Vital Voices. In 2019, she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and as a Young Leader by Asia Society.
d’bi.young anitafrika is an African-Jamaican-Tkarontonian, London-based dub poet, theatre interventionist and decolonial scholar committed to embodying art that ritualizes acts of transformation from violence inflicted upon the people and the planet. The multi-award-winning Canadian Poet of Honour, author of twelve plays, seven albums, and four collections of poetry was recently recognized as a Global Leader in Theatre and Performance by Arts Council England. After receiving hxr Masters from the University of London, anitafrika was awarded a Dean's Scholarship by London South Bank University (LSBU) to conduct doctoral research in Black womxn’s theatre. In addition to being the Director of Curriculum Design and Pedagogy at the new Soulpepper Theatre Academy in Canada, anitafrika works at the UN's Global Initiatives Fellowship as Theatre Interventionist and lectures at LSBU. Shx continues to share hxr liberatory framework—the Anitafrika Method—with practitioners worldwide through hxr ongoing online residencies. Shx most recently worked as Director of Kaie Kellough’s Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song for Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures project and is currently completing Dubbin Theatre, an anthology of hxr plays written between 2000-2020. You can find hxr latest theatrical work in She Mama Wata— as an audio version that she wrote, directed and performed—featured in Soulpepper Theatre’s Around the World in 80 Plays.
Raji Aujla is the founder and president of Willendorf Cultural Planning and editor-in-chief of Newest Magazine, sister companies that focus on better representation and inclusion of IBPoC voices in Canadian arts and culture. She has been a cultural builder, curator, creative director, and advocate in the Canadian arts sector for the past ten years. Prior to this, she worked in journalism, spending tireless hours researching and developing stories focused on racial, gender, and caste injustices. Throughout this experience, storytelling has been her greatest superpower to help bring together people of different backgrounds and beliefs and to empower her generation to design a better future. She believes that the arts have a transformative power to bring people together and build empathy.
Aujla studied Visual Culture at the University of Toronto. She sits on the boards and committees for Canada’s National Ballet School, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Baaz News, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Toronto Foundation’s Vision 2020 Alumni. She was selected as an Independent Curator for the City of Toronto’s Year of Public Art in 2021. Raji works as a freelancer for The Globe and Mail and has bylines in the CBC, Chatelaine, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, and Baaz News. She also co-founded the aujla + vukets foundation with the aim to mentor and fund female-led social impact ideas.
Roy Dib (born in 1983) is an artist and filmmaker based in Beirut. On both formal and conceptual levels, Roy Dib challenges common notions of space and boundary, weaving together archival material, scripted text and hypothetical circumstances to chronicle the political narratives of our day.
His work has been presented at Studio la Città (2021), Loop Barcelona (2020), Galerie Tanit (2018), MAXXI Museum (2017), Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), ALFILM (2017), JCC (2016), Forum Expanded – 64th and 65th Berlinale, Exposure 2015 – Beirut Art Center, Uppsala International Short Film Festival (2014), Queer Lisboa (2014), Images Festival (2016) - Toronto, Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2013, 2015 and 2017), Ashkal Alwan (2014), and Video Works (2011–2014).
Irmgard Emmelhainz is a professor, writer, researcher, and translator based in Anahuac Valley (Mexico City). She holds a PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto and an MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to many languages and she has presented it at an array of international venues, including Harvard, the March Meeting at Sharjah, the Walter Benjamin in Palestine Conference (2015), The New School and Americas Society (2016), SBC Gallery, Montreal (2016), The University of California in San Diego, ArtBo, Bogotá, School of Visual Arts, New York, KHIO at Oslo, University of Texas El Paso (2020), Stanford University (2021), MoMA (2022), and more. Her books include Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance (Vanderbilt University Press, Critical Mexican Studies Series, 2021 and in Spanish by Taurus); The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Postneoliberal Conversion (SUNY Press, 2020); Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine (Taurus Mexico, 2017), forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press in 2023.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.”
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Kevin Gotkin is an access ecologist, community organizer, and teacher. They received their PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and were a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at NYU from 2018–2021. From 2016–2019, they co-founded Disability/Arts/NYC with Simi Linton. More recently, they were an Artist-in-Residence at Het HEM in the Netherlands, lead steward of the REMOTE ACCESS nightlife series, and an inaugural cohort member of Creative Time's Think Tank.
Based in Toronto, Luis Jacob is an artist whose work destabilizes conventions of viewing and invites collisions of meaning. Jacob has achieved an international reputation, with his work exhibited at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2019); Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2019); the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2018); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Taipei Biennial 2012; Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Hamburg Kunstverein, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (both 2008); and Documenta12, Kassel (2007). In 2016 he curated the exhibition Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, with a catalogue co-published with Black Dog Press in 2020.
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land- and water-protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Johnson is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history, and role in building futures. Johnson is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Johnson hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts, and is part of an advisory group (with Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner) developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family roots are from Papaschase First Nation, amiskwaciy wâskahikan (Edmonton, AB) and Kikino Metis Settlement, AB. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place, incorporating Indigenous language(s), audio, video, VR, olfactory, sewn objects, music, and audience/user participation to create immersive environments towards “radical inclusion.” As a songwriter, L’Hirondelle’s focus is on both sharing nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) and Indigenous and contemporary song-forms, and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance.
She is the recent recipient the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. In addition, Cheryl was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 & 2006), and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 & 2007), and has been nominated for or received honorable mention for various other arts and music awards. Her work has been published, written about, exhibited, performed, and presented regionally, nationally, and internationally. L’Hirondelle holds a Master of Design from OCAD University’s Inclusive Design program (2015) and is a current member of the university’s Indigenous Education Council. She is currently a PhD candidate with SMARTlab at University College, Dublin, in Ireland.
Ramin Mazhar is, a poet, journalist, and human rights activist from Afghanistan. He graduated from the Persian language and literature program at Kabul university and has worked for 8AM Daily Newspaper and Afghanistan Independent Human Commission.
Two years ago, during peace negotiation talks between the US government and the Taliban, Ramin organized and performed an art program at Kabul University in protest. He said to the audience that in those talks, victims of war, women, and Afghanistan are completely ignored. He also expressed the pain and frustration of millions of Afghans who thought that the peace talks would hand the country back to the Taliban, and that the progress over the last twenty years related to democratic values and basic human rights would be eliminated.
That program and protest gained lots of attention and support among media, policy makers and politicians.
“Kiss you amid the Taliban and you don’t fear,” one of Mahzar's highly political poems, which was posted on social media during those talks, was read and shared by millions of users in Afghanistan and Iran. His poem brought diverse social groups and activists together to work on supporting the voices of youth and victims of war so that they can be heard in peace talks and beyond.
Later the poem turned into a song by young singer Ghawgha Tanban. After her, a dozen other singers from Afghanistan and Iran sang the song to show their resistance and struggle against oppression and extremism. Mazhar’s poems have a huge audience in both Afghanistan and Iran, and often combine a mixture of love and protest against religious fundamentalism and war.
Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge) is Assistant Professor of Anishinaabe Studies at Algoma University and Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig, and has Lectured at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University, The University of Waterloo, and coordinated Indigenous Studies at Conestoga College. He specializes in Anishinaabe cultural knowledge, ethno-medicine, and land-based learning. Mkomose has learned from, worked and consulted with, and served Indigenous Elders and community leaders for over a decade. He has founded several community-led Indigenous knowledge-based programs at elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels and works tirelessly to promote land-based sustainability practices. Mkomose has delivered over a hundred invited lectures related to Indigenous knowledge. He is focused on supporting conscious awakening using plant medicines and Anishinaabe cosmovision to respond to the current state of society. He has been initiated into both Midewiwin and Mayan Day Keeping societies and regularly participates in the ancient ceremonial practices of his Anishinaabe ancestors.
Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 in Delhi, India. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, and being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective take this sense to mean “kinetic contemplation” and a restless entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs enlists objects such as an early-modern tiger-automata from Southern India, or a biscuit from the Paris Commune, or a cup salvaged from an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck, to turn them into devices to sniff and taste time. Devices and modalities are also played with to undertake historical subterfuge and philosophical query. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation.
The members of Raqs Media Collective live and work in Delhi, India. In 2001, they co-founded the Sarai program at CSDS New Delhi and ran it for a decade, where they also edited the Sarai Reader series. Raqs’ work has been shown in museums and exhibitions across the world, including Documenta 11; the Venice, Istanbul, Sydney, Shanghai and Sao Paulo Biennales; and solo exhibitions and projects at the National Gallery of Modern Art (Delhi), Tate Modern (London), UNAM (Mexico City), Fundacion Proa (Buenos Aires), Whitworth Gallery (Manchester), K-21 (Dusseldorf), and Mathaf (Doha), amongst others.
Curated exhibitions by Raqs include The Rest of Now (Manifesta 8, 2011), Sarai Reader 09 (Devi Art Foundation, Gurugram, 2012), Insert2014 (IGNCA, Delhi, 2014), Why Not Ask Again (Shanghai Biennale, 2016), In the Open or in Stealth (MACBA, Barcelona, 2018), Five Million Incidents (Goethe Institut, Delhi & Kolkata, 2019-2020) and Afterglow (Yokohama Triennale, 2020).
Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Róisín’s work exists at the intersections of her identity as a queer, Muslim, South Asian woman interested in spirituality, race and pop culture. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Allure. She has also pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities.
She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019) and the novel Like A Bird (2020). Her upcoming work is a book of non-fiction entitled, Who Is Wellness For?, to be released in spring 2022.
Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, Treaty 7 Territory, in southern Alberta. Stimson has a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He is an interdisciplinary artist and exhibits nationally and internationally.
He has completed and continues to work on several public art projects including: Bison Sentinels, a memorial to murdered and missing Indigenous women, First Nations University, Regina; Spirit of Alliance, a War of 1812 monument, Saskatoon; Bison Heart, Sweetgrass Bison, and Kowa’pomahkaiks: Animals that Roam the Prairie, Calgary; and Peace, Northern Lights Cemetery, Edmonton. Stimson was shortlisted for The Monument to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan, Ottawa.
Stimson’s performance art looks at identity construction. His Bison paintings are monochromatic, evoking melancholy, whimsy, cultural fragility and resilience. His installation work examines the residential school experience and speaks to loss, resilience, and conciliation. He was a participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, which sent him to Afghanistan in 2010.
Stimson received the Alumni of Influence Award in 2020 from the University of Saskatchewan, the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2018, the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017, the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003.
Melati Suryodarmo (born 1969, Solo, Indonesia) graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunscheweig, Germany. Her practice is informed by Butoh, dance and history, among other things. Her work is the result of ongoing research in the movements of the body and its relationship to the self and the world. These are translated into photography, dance choreography, video, and live performances. Suryodarmo is interested in the psychological and physical agitations that may be from the self or the world but somehow result in lasting change on the individual. The body is the home for memories and the self, rather than the individual itself, and the body’s system.
Suryodarmo has presented her work in locations all over the world, including Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; MMCA, Gwacheon, South Korea; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Para Site, Hong Kong; QAGOMA, Australia; and the Singapore Art Museum. Festivals include 5th Guangzhou Triennale (2015); Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale (2009); and Manifesta 7 (2008).
Since 2007, Suryodarmo has been organizing PALA and Undisclosed Territory, both annual performance art festivals, in Solo, Indonesia. In 2012, she founded “Studio Plesungan”, an art space for performance artists. In 2017, she served as Artistic Director for the 17th Jakarta Biennale.
Paulo Tavares is an architect, writer, and educator. He is the author of Forest Law (2014), Des-Habitat (2019), and Memória da terra (2020), and runs the spatial advocacy agency autonoma. He teaches spatial and visual cultures at the University of Brasília in Brazil.
Françoise Vergès loves green mangoes with chili and lime, to cook for friends, to swim, to sew, to read, to dance and go to protest marches. She likes hot weather. She grew up in Reunion Island, Indian Ocean, and is forever grateful to have been educated by anticolonial feminist activist parents. She speaks Creole. She is an antiracist decolonial feminist who admires, and is inspired by, the struggles, voices, and strength of Black, Indigenous and brown women.
Romily Alice Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centres a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Their practice questions contemporary Western society's relationship with care, tenderness and vulnerability in relation to our bodies, our communities and our ecosystem. Walden is interested in our ability (and failure) to navigate physicality, interdependency and fallibility both communally and individually. Recent work has shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art: Newcastle, Hebel Am Uffer: Berlin, SOHO20: New York, Kunstinstituut Melly: Rotterdam, and Tate Exchange: Tate Modern: London. In 2019 Walden was a Shandaken Storm King resident and will be resident at Wysing Arts Centre and HAU Berlin in 2021. Since 2019, Walden has been a fellow of the Universität der Künste Berlin Graduate School and Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences.
Ravyn Wngz, “The Black Widow of Burlesque,” is a Tanzanian, Bermudian, Mohawk, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent empowerment storyteller. Ravyn is an abolitionist and co-founder of ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company. She is a Canadian Best-Selling Author, one of the Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada (2021), and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada. She serves on the steering team of the Black Lives Matter Toronto Chapter, a group committed to eradicating all forms of anti-Black racism and to supporting Black healing and liberating Black communities.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Photographers and Illustrators: Adam Sings In The Timber, Jackie Brown, Tenille Campbell, Harry Hartantio, Fatimah Hossaini, Nicole Georges, Louise Hickman, Miguel Jacob, Max Knight, Andrea Pinheiro, Pedro Pinho, Clémence Polès, Anthony Rock, Vicky Roy, Blaire Russell, Aly Saab, Boulomsouk Svadphaiphane, Nithya Thayaal, Lake Verea, Soraya Zaman
Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power is commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. The Blackwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Additional support is provided by the Jackman Humanities Institute program for the arts.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
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