Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition is part-workshop, part-conference, part-crit session, part-master class, part-experiment, part-chance composition. It is also part of the Blackwood Gallery’s 2016–2017 exhibition program which animates questions of choreography and sets out to mobilize another set of terms: counterproductivity, co-immunity, choreopolitics, and care.
This fourth edition of Running with Concepts traces choreography across individual bodies and the systems that distribute and contain them. Presenters will address choreography’s entanglements with capitalism, power, the global economy, healthcare, pedagogy, collectivism, technology, cartography, and art-making. The conference will play host to performances, processions, demonstrations, workshops, screenings, lectures, interviews, and conversations to open multiple perspectives on the ramifications of the choreographic in the 21st century, including:
The choreography of labour
The circulation of stuff
The capture and control of bodies
The pace of capitalism
The enclosure of territories
The rearrangement of matter
The choreography of fabrication
The imperative to participate
The sharing economy
The choreography of exhibitions
The crisis of care
The potential of rehearsal
Performed across the UTM campus, Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition takes aim at the multiple connections between art and globalization and asks how we might think about the relation between choreography and politics today without repeating neoliberal demands and constraints? Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition will become a rehearsal space for possible ways of entering the social and of positioning oneself with others.
Schedule
FRIDAY
5pm – Bus departs 280 Bloor Street for UTM
6pm – Opening remarks, Blackwood Gallery
6:30pm – Emily Mast, Procession (multiple locations)
7:45pm – Julie Pellegrin, What Does Choreography do to Exhibitions?, CCT Building, Rm 1080
8:45pm – Reception, e|gallery
9:30pm – Bus returns for Toronto
SATURDAY
9am – Bus departs 280 Bloor Street for UTM
9:30-10am – REGISTRATION/COFFEE
10am – Introduction
10:15-11:15am – Julia Bryan-Wilson, Minds Over Matter, Kaneff Centre, Rm 137
11:15-11:45am – k.g. Guttman, I ask the audience to close one eye, Innovation Complex Rotunda
11:45 – BREAK
12:15-1:15pm – Julien Prévieux, Patterns of Life, Kaneff Centre, Rm L1220
1:15-2pm – Stephanie Anderson, Kirsty Robertson, Shannon Stratton, Time and Time Again: A Conversation, Kaneff Centre, Rm L1220
2–2:45pm – LUNCH
3–3:30pm – MORTIFIED, MORTIFIED: Laboratory of Learning, CCT Building, Underground Parking Garage
3:45-4:15pm – Alvin Luong, 10 Aircraft Marshalling Moves for Beginners 10 Minute Daily Routine!, CCT Building, Lobby
4:30–6:30pm – The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, CCT Building, Circuit Café
6:30pm – Bus returns for Toronto
SUNDAY
9am – Bus departs 280 Bloor Street for UTM
9:30-10am – REGISTRATION/COFFEE
10:15-10:45am – Gabriel Levine, Practice: Rehearsing a Non-Concept, Instructional Centre, Rm 220
11-11:30am – Amelia Ehrhardt & Fabien Maltais-Bayda, Working in (Proximity to) Dance, Instructional Centre, Rm 110
11:30am-12pm – BREAK
12:15-1:15pm – Olive McKeon, Dance or/and/as Revolution, Instructional Centre, Rm 110
1:30-2pm – Angela Veronica Wong & Caroline Doherty, Model Applications, Instructional Centre, Rm 240
2-2:45pm – LUNCH
3-3:45pm – Francisco-Fernando Granados & Johanna Householder, movement studies: Johanna Householder + Francisco-Fernando Granados in Conversation, Deerfield Hall, Rm 1070
4-5pm – Mel Y. Chen, Movement Without Disability, Deerfield Hall, Atrium
5:15-6:00pm – Sarah Sharma, A Moving Inventory of Exits, Deerfield Hall, Rm 2060
6pm – Bus returns for Toronto
Sep 16, 2016 – Sep 18, 2016
Past
Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition
A three-day hybrid event
Invited Faculty: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mel Y. Chen, Emily Mast, Julie Pellegrin, Julien Prévieux, Sarah Sharma, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People (Heyward Bracey, Ashley Hunt, Turay Turay, Kim Zumpfe)
Presenters: Alvin Luong, Olive Mckeon, MORTIFIED (Camilla Singh & Jenn Goodwin), Angela Veronica Wong & Caroline Doherty, Francisco-Fernando Granados & Johanna Householder, Gabriel Levine, Amelia Ehrhardt & Fabien Maltais-Bayda, k.g. Guttman, and Stephanie Anderson, Kirsty Robertson & Shannon Stratton
Co-hosted by Christine Shaw and Ame Henderson
Various locations across UTM campus
Invited Faculty: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mel Y. Chen, Emily Mast, Julie Pellegrin, Julien Prévieux, Sarah Sharma, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People (Heyward Bracey, Ashley Hunt, Turay Turay, Kim Zumpfe)
Presenters: Alvin Luong, Olive Mckeon, MORTIFIED (Camilla Singh & Jenn Goodwin), Angela Veronica Wong & Caroline Doherty, Francisco-Fernando Granados & Johanna Householder, Gabriel Levine, Amelia Ehrhardt & Fabien Maltais-Bayda, k.g. Guttman, and Stephanie Anderson, Kirsty Robertson & Shannon Stratton
Co-hosted by Christine Shaw and Ame Henderson
Various locations across UTM campus
Friday Sessions
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Saturday Sessions
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Sunday Sessions
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Event Documentation
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Friday Sessions
Saturday Sessions
Sunday Sessions
Event Documentation
- Invited Faculty
- Julia Bryan-Wilson
- Mel Y. Chen
- Emily Mast
- Julie Pellegrin
- Julien Prévieux
- Sarah Sharma
- The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People
- Heyward Bracey
- Turay Turay
- Ashley Hunt
- Kim Zumpfe
Julia Bryan-Wilson’s research interests include questions of artistic labour, feminism, queer theory, fabrication/production, performance, visual culture of the nuclear age, photography, and textile handicraft. A scholar and critic, Bryan-Wilson has written about artists such Laylah Ali, Ida Applebroog, Sadie Benning, the Cockettes, Simone Forti, Cristóbal Lehyt, Ana Mendieta, Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Harmony Hammond, Sharon Hayes, and Anne Wilson, in numerous publications. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009), which was named a “best book of the year” by Artforum magazine, editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris, and, with Glenn Adamson, co-author of Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. She is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Chen’s 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, MLA Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy. Chen’s second book project concerns the relationships among the conceptual territories of “toxicity” and “intoxication” and their involvement in histories of the shared interanimation of race and disability. Writing on cognitive disability and method, the racialization of pollution, and more, can be found in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Women in Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Medical Humanities, and GLQ. Chen coedits a book series entitled Anima, highlighting scholarship in critical race and disability post/in/humanisms at Duke University Press.
Emily Mast (born in Akron, Ohio, 1976) recently staged a solo “choreographed exhibition” called Missing Missing at La Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, France, and an eighteen-part roving procession of performances based on the poetry of Joan Brossa at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In addition, her video, installation, and performance work was part of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial (2014). Mast’s performances have been exhibited at venues including: China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2015); Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris (2015); Silencio, Paris (2015); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space, New York (2013); Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2012); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012); MUHKA, Antwerp (2011); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2010); and Performa, New York (2009). Mast has received numerous awards including a Harpo Foundation Grant (2013); Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant (2013); Franklin Furnace Fund Grant (2013); and a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2012). In 2009 Mast graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California and has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito; and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs.
Since 2007, Julie Pellegrin has been the director of the Art Centre of la Ferme du Buisson in the outskirts of Paris. She aims to create a dialogue between contemporary art and other art forms (with a particular emphasis on theatre and dance), as well as social science, focusing on the significance of processes and experimentation in the performative dimension of art. She organises solo (Isabelle Cornaro, Gianni Motti, Denis Savary, Mathieu Abonnenc, Julien Bismuth, Emily Mast, Kapwani Kiwanga…) and group exhibitions (A Choreographed Exhibition, Treasures for Theatre, The Yvonne Rainer Project, Alfred Jarry Archipelago…) mixed with publications, talks, and performances. Publisher of over a dozen artist monographs and artists’ books, Julie Pellegrin recently published, together with fellow curator Mathieu Copeland, a collective anthology entitled Choreographing Exhibitions. In 2013, she co-curated Nuit Blanche in Paris with Chiara Parisi.
Julien Prévieux has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou (Paris), RISD Museum (Providence), FRAC Basse-Normandie (Caen), Synagogue de Delme Art Center, Domaine de Kerguennec Art Center (Bignan), among others, and was included in the 10th International Istanbul Biennale and the 2015 Lyon Biennale. His work has been included in group exhibitions at DiverseWorks (Houston), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Witte de With (Rotterdam), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Santa Barbara), and Kunstverein Hannover. Prévieux received the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2014 and is represented by Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris.
Sarah Sharma is Associate Professor of Media Theory at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology and Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2014) and is currently working on a new book that explores the gendered politics of exit and refusal, or what she terms the ‘(s)Exit’ within contemporary techno-culture.
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a large-scale installation and performance platform that acts as a dance school. The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People responds to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds amidst the evolving violence against Black bodies, gentrification, and the persistent erasure of communities of colour throughout history. This multidisciplinary platform is built from the dance company WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), which uses dance moves, protest forms, weight exchange, concealment strategies, and the everyday movement vocabularies of survival and celebration that structure Black and queer life. Heyward Bracey is a butoh influenced dancer/movement artist. Turay Turay is a performance artist and social justice advocate. Ashley Hunt is an image-maker, writer, and educator. Kim Zumpfe is an artist, educator, and sculptor. WXPT is an intentional community in the form of a dance company.
Heyward Bracey—a butoh influenced dancer/movement artist—has worked and performed with a number of experimental dance collectives including Corpus Delicti, Body Weather Laboratory, Los Angeles Movement Arts, and, most recently, WXPT - The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People. He has collaborated with master butoh artist Katsura Kan in Los Angeles, New York, and at the Seattle International Dance Festival. His recent solo, Stealing Skin 6, was presented at the Bare Bones Butoh Showcase in San Francisco, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, and Central Cultural Los Talleres in Mexico City. Heyward's interest in the body as a social/political/spiritual process has led to recent collaborations with Emily Mast in The Least Important Things, presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Cage is a Stage, presented at University of Toronto Mississauga, the Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto, and the REDCAT, Los Angeles.
Turay Turay (pronouns they, them, and theirs) is a Black, queer, gender non-conforming performance artist and social justice advocate. Their communion with dance has been mostly a private practice of transformative healing. Turay has been in a movement practice with WXPT, March 2015, as a means of affirming and further exploring their relationship to dance. Turay comes to their practice as a means of radical self-care.
Ashley Hunt uses photography, the moving image, performance, map-making, and writing to engage social movements, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. The bulk of his art-making documents the expansion of the US prison system and its effects on communities as one way to address structures that either allow some people to accumulate power or keep others from getting power, while learning from the ways people come to know, contribute to, or resist these structures. Hunt’s work has been exhibited in venues ranging from DiverseWorks (Houston), MoMA, Tate Modern, Documenta 12, and Project Row Houses in Houston through to community centers and prisons. Hunt is the Co-Director of the Program in Photography and Media at CalArts and is on the Visual Art faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Kim Zumpfe is an artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work moves and negotiates between bodies, objects, and politicized space - to interrogate encounters where there is a collapse of identity, intimacy, and power structures. She investigates the self within constructed sites and architectures, spaces and where multiple bodies develop, displace, produce, and forget to maintain boundaries and relations. Her work investigates the possibilities of where borders within these forms disperse through engagement with various media, including images, sculpture, video, installation, sound, and performance. Within her collaborations and individual work, she works to expand the potentials of resistance by producing psychological spaces that contain porosities of bent time(s) including the provisional, temporary, transient, unstable, and the illegible. Zumpfe’s work has been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), UCR Culver Center for the Arts Riverside, DiverseWorks, University Art Gallery Irvine, Visual Arts Center Fullerton, University Art Museum Long Beach, and several public and online sites. She is a member of Emily O, a free-floating artist collective that questions the relationship between individual and collective processes and identity through organizing exhibitions and collaborative writing.
- Presenters
- Alvin Luong
- MORTIFIED
- Olive Mckeon
- Angela Veronica Wong
- Caroline Doherty
- Francisco-Fernando Granados
- k.g. Guttman
- Johanna Householder
- Gabriel Levine
- Amelia Ehrhardt
- Fabien Maltais-Bayda
- Stephanie Anderson
- Kirsty Robertson
- Shannon Stratton
Alvin Luong is an artist from Toronto. Luong works with lens-based media and performance to consider how documentations and instructions are created and how they can be interpreted. Luong has exhibited in group exhibitions at Gallery 44 and Trinity Square Video, and exhibited commissioned works at Trinity Square Video. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo project at PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts in 2017/18. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
MORTIFIED is a two-person band: visual artist Camilla Singh, and choreographer Jenn Goodwin, who immerse themselves in their emotional response to a combative world. Adopting the format of a band to encompass a range of activities, MORTIFIED creates a sonic experience through movement and mayhem. The performances result in a “concert” exploring aggression and enthusiasm, kindness and rage, pride and regret, through tap dancing, cheerleading, drumming, and fight choreography.
Olive Mckeon is a dancer and researcher based in Oakland. A doctoral candidate at UCLA, she is writing a dissertation on the political economy of concert dance, focusing on 20th century modern dance in San Francisco. She works with SALTA, the feminist curatorial collective, to run a monthly experimental dance series in Oakland. She is lecturer in the Critical Studies department at the California College of the Arts.
Angela Veronica Wong is the author of how to survive a hotel fire, a featured poetry debut in Poets & Writers, and elsa (2017). Her chapbooks include Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter, winner of a Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook fellowship. She has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry and Please Excuse This Poem. Her performance work has been featured or is forthcoming at independent galleries in Buffalo and New York City.
Caroline Doherty employs multiple media to engage questions of communication, violence, and power. She completed an MFA at SUNY Buffalo in 2016, and a BFA in Sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art in 2004. She has exhibited, performed, collaborated, taught, and been a resident artist in North America, Europe, East Africa, and China, most recently at SOMA in Mexico City; ArtPark in Lewiston, NY; Tsinghua University in Beijing; the Chongjiang Contemporary Art Museum in Chongqing; and CEPA Gallery in Buffalo. Alongside her art practice, Caroline teaches people of many ages and backgrounds how to make and do new things.
Francisco-Fernando Granados’ multidisciplinary critical practice spans performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Darling Foundry (Montreal), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki). Awards and honours include the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010, and being named as one of Canada's 30 Under 30 by BLOUIN ARTINFO in 2014. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and is a member of the 7a*11d International Performance Festival Collective.
k.g. Guttman (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and teacher, a solo mother, and currently a 2023-24 Artist-in-Residence in the Intermedia area of Studio Arts (video, performance and electronic arts) at Concordia University, Montreal.
k.g. is a graduate of Leiden University's PhDArts program, the Netherlands, receiving funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their work on situated performance in the settler colonial context of Canada.
From the social location of a white settler of Jewish and Irish descent, she works on the complexities of the local, encompassing collaboration, visiting, and radical hospitality. Current research into bodily memory and somatic practices in pedagogy and practice have been informed by circumstances in childhood/ young adulthood of generalized anxiety/ depression and an environment that disavowed emotions.
k.g.’s recent exhibitions, performances and publications were held at TPW Gallery and Blackwood Gallery in Toronto, Verticale, VIVA! Art action, Dazibao Centre Art, and LaCentrale in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal, Musée d’Art de Joliette, Klupko, Amsterdam, Galerie Khiasma and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Choreographic residencies and commissions include l’Agora de la Danse and Tangente, Montreal, the Canada Dance Festival, Dancemakers, Toronto, LeGroupe Dance Lab, Ottawa, the University of Sonora, Mexico, BudaKustencentrum, Kortijk and Pointe Ephémère, Paris.
k.g. is a graduate of Leiden University's PhDArts program, the Netherlands, receiving funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their work on situated performance in the settler colonial context of Canada.
From the social location of a white settler of Jewish and Irish descent, she works on the complexities of the local, encompassing collaboration, visiting, and radical hospitality. Current research into bodily memory and somatic practices in pedagogy and practice have been informed by circumstances in childhood/ young adulthood of generalized anxiety/ depression and an environment that disavowed emotions.
k.g.’s recent exhibitions, performances and publications were held at TPW Gallery and Blackwood Gallery in Toronto, Verticale, VIVA! Art action, Dazibao Centre Art, and LaCentrale in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal, Musée d’Art de Joliette, Klupko, Amsterdam, Galerie Khiasma and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Choreographic residencies and commissions include l’Agora de la Danse and Tangente, Montreal, the Canada Dance Festival, Dancemakers, Toronto, LeGroupe Dance Lab, Ottawa, the University of Sonora, Mexico, BudaKustencentrum, Kortijk and Pointe Ephémère, Paris.
Johanna Householder works through performance, dance, video, and intermedia art. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies has led her largely collaborative practice. She has recently performed in Mexico, Singapore, Java, and Calgary and reset her 1978 solo for Toronto Dance Theatre and the AGO. She is a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art which held its 11th biennial in October, and is a Professor at OCAD University.
Gabriel Levine is a researcher, writer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist, whose work explores vernacular experimentation in the visual and performing arts. His writing has appeared in the journals TOPIA, PUBLIC, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and his music and performance projects have toured widely. In 2016, he curated and produced Animate Entities: Objects in Performance, a two-day festival at the University of Toronto. He is the co-editor (with Marcus Boon) of Practice: A Reader. He is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University.
Amelia Ehrhardt is a choreographer, performer, curator, and obsessive organizer. She makes work that interrogates, provokes, and troubles what we see as the specificities and parameters of contemporary dance. She has worked in residence and shown her work at HATCH/Harbourfront Centre, Toronto Dance Theatre, Studio 303, and the OFFTA (Montréal). She has performed in works by Carol Anderson, Susie Burpee, Julia Sasso, and Menaka Thakkar, and has worked extensively with multimedia artist Zeesy Powers. She holds an honours BA in Dance Studies from York University and has trained independently in Toronto, Montréal, and Vienna. Amelia is the Curator at Dancemakers and is the founder of Flowchart: a Series of Performance. She was on the creative team of the Toronto Dance Community Love-In from 2013-2015 and in 2015 she was the Curator of the inaugural dance series at SummerWorks Performance Festival.
Fabien Maltais-Bayda holds an MA in performance studies from the University of Toronto. He has worked with contemporary dance presenter Tangente, and the International Community of Performing Arts Curators. Fabien writes for publications including Canadian Art, The Dance Current, esse, and Momus, and was a 2016-17 Writer-in-Residence at Dancemakers.
Stephanie Anderson is a PhD candidate in Art and Visual Culture at Western University with a specialization in labour theory, the creative economy, and the politics of maker culture. She has held curatorial and research internships at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, and McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario. In 2015 she co-organized Re: Mediation: A Dialogue on Immersive and Interactive Art, a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Very Nervous System at McIntosh Gallery. Her current research explores the historically fraught relationship between artistic production and the wider structures of work and labor which characterize late capitalism.
Kirsty Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on the topic and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New Economies of Protest, Vision, and Culture in Canada. More recently, she has turned her attention to the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments, and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and creative economies. Her co-edited volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released in 2011, and her tri-authored volume Putting IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday was released by Oxford University Press in December 2013.
Shannon Stratton is the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at The Museum of Arts and Design (New York). For twelve years she was the Director and Curator of Threewalls in Chicago, a contemporary art space that she co-founded in 2003. Threewalls founded the Hand-in-Glove Conference and later co-founded the Common Field Network for grassroots arts initiatives as well as publishing PHONEBOOK, a guide to grassroots and alternative artist resources throughout the United States. Current exhibitions include Atmosphere for Enjoyment, the first exhibition to deal solely with Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures, and the traveling exhibition, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries, the first retrospective of the work of Wilding, a key figure in the feminist art movement. Other curatorial projects have included Resonating Bodies at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN (2013), and Gestures of Resistance: The Slow Assertions of Craft at The Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR (2010).
- Co-hosted by
- Christine Shaw
- Ame Henderson
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).
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).
Ame Henderson (Tkaronto) is an artist working with dance and choreography. With a practice that spans publication, performance and exhibition, her work proposes experiential modes of being together. With the collective company Public Recordings she produced and toured over a dozen ensemble works from 2003–15 and she was a collaborator at Toronto Dance Theatre from 2013–19. In Toronto, her work has been shared in collaboration with AGYU, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, Gallery TPW, Dancemakers, Theatre Centre and Harbourfront Centre, and with The Blackwood in the context of I stood before the source and Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition. Henderson is currently working on the final dispatch in a triptych of duets co-created and performed with Matija Ferlin, and is a collaborator in new performance projects with Katie Ward, Aleesa Cohene and Evan Webber. She has facilitated choreographic practice in a variety of contexts including University of British Columbia – Okanagan, University of Calgary, Toronto Dance Theatre, Toronto Community Love-In and Banff Centre. Henderson holds a graduate degree in Choreography from the Amsterdam School for the Arts, is a Gestalt Psychotherapist (RP Q) in private practice, and is a facilitator of the Resilience Toolkit, a trauma-and social justice-informed framework to support holistic wellness and self-agency.
Running with Concepts: the Choreographic Edition is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Department of Visual Studies (UTM) through the Graduate Expansion Fund, the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, and the Consulate General of France in Toronto.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.