The fifth edition of the Blackwood Gallery’s annual event concludes Take Care, a year-long program confronting the crisis of care. Bringing together artists, researchers, activists, and care professionals, Running with Concepts: The Empathic Edition explores the ethics of empathy, care as undercommons, and the prospects of a care coalition towards making care otherwise. The event asks: If care is a connective issue across social contexts and struggles, what might a new care coalition look like? What are the limits of empathy for promoting an ability to relate without identification, appropriation, or condescension? Running with Concepts: The Empathic Edition challenges prevailing assumptions about institutional forms of collective welfare and explores the limitations, and possibilities, of detaching practices of care from their tendency to reproduce dominant gender, racial, and economic relations.
Running with Concepts: The Empathic Edition appropriates the structure of Jakob Jakobsen’s project, Hospital Prison University Archive—in which he explores tensions between logics of care and logics of institutions—as the organizing device for the event. Borrowing from this strategy, each day is organized around a spatial-conceptual theme: UNIVERSITY, PRISON, HOSPITAL. The event opens with Friday evening presentations by Jakobsen, Karina Griffith, and Pelin Tan. Together they track pedagogy’s structures and methodologies through state institutions of care, reparations struggles, and extra-territorial spaces. Moving from academic and pedagogical tools to instruments of domination, punishment, and surveillance, Saturday’s events address the control of bodies and spaces—exploring how we might organize outside of systems of capture, oppression, and possession. Presentations by Alana Bartol, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Nasrin Himada, Wanda Nanibush, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jamie Ross, Sheena Hoszko, Robyn Maynard, and Matthew-Robin Nye explore the insides and outsides of sites (carceral, cultural, conceptual, and infrastructural) that detain and delimit. Turning toward medical systems on Sunday, presentations by Frog in Hand, Sheharyar Raza, Declan Gould, Steven Eastwood, Naheed Dosani, Jenny Lau, Kimberley Widger, Susan Wolf, Carolyn Lazard, Jeff Reinhart, Tea Hadžiristić, Lena Suksi & Fan Wu, and Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr interrogate and consider child and youth care, the treatment of gun violence, Alzheimer’s poetry, palliative care, therapeutic objects, accessibility guidelines, harm reduction, empathy burnout, and counter-reproduction, together mobilizing critical approaches to medicine and healing that “cut through apathy and empathy.”1
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Mar 09, 2018 – Mar 11, 2018
Past
Running with Concepts: The Empathic Edition
A three-day hybrid event
Invited Presenters
Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Steven Eastwood, Nasrin Himada, Sheena Hoszko, Jakob Jakobsen, Carolyn Lazard, Robyn Maynard, Wanda Nanibush, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jeff Reinhart, Pelin Tan
Selected Presenters
Alana Bartol, Frog in Hand (Thomas Colford, Samuel Davilmar, Shadan Hyder, Paul Kitz, Cory McKinlay, Colleen Snell, Heather Snell), Declan Gould, Karina Griffith, Tea Hadžiristić, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Matthew-Robin Nye, Sheharyar Raza, Jamie Ross, Lena Suksi, Susan Wolf, Fan Wu
Hosted by
Christine Shaw
Invited Presenters
Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Steven Eastwood, Nasrin Himada, Sheena Hoszko, Jakob Jakobsen, Carolyn Lazard, Robyn Maynard, Wanda Nanibush, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jeff Reinhart, Pelin Tan
Selected Presenters
Alana Bartol, Frog in Hand (Thomas Colford, Samuel Davilmar, Shadan Hyder, Paul Kitz, Cory McKinlay, Colleen Snell, Heather Snell), Declan Gould, Karina Griffith, Tea Hadžiristić, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Matthew-Robin Nye, Sheharyar Raza, Jamie Ross, Lena Suksi, Susan Wolf, Fan Wu
Hosted by
Christine Shaw
Friday Sessions
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Saturday Sessions
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Sunday Sessions
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Event Documentation
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Saturday Sessions
Sunday Sessions
Friday Sessions
Saturday Sessions
Sunday Sessions
Event Documentation
- Invited Presenters
- Joshua Clover
- Steven Eastwood
- Nasrin Himada
- Sheena Hoszko
- Jakob Jakobsen
- Carolyn Lazard
- Robyn Maynard
- Wanda Nanibush
- M. NourbeSe Philip
- Jeff Reinhart
- Juliana Spahr
- Pelin Tan
Joshua Clover is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Davis. He is the author of six books, including poetry, cultural history, and political theory; his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. His most recent books are the poetry collection Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015) and Riot.Strike.Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016), a political economy of insurrection and re-narration of capital’s history. He edits Studies in Revolution and Literature for Palgrave Macmillan along with Bruno Bosteels.
Steven Eastwood is an artist and filmmaker whose practice spans documentary film, installation-based moving image, media arts, and theory. He holds a PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and teaches film practice at Queen Mary University of London. He has held Visiting Lecturer positions at Harvard University, University of Greenwich, and University of Buffalo. His feature-length film, Island, premiered at BFI London Film Festival in 2017 and the sibling multichannel video installation, The Interval and the Instant, was presented at Fabrica (Brighton). His feature film Buried Land was an official selection at the Tribeca, Moscow, Sarajevo, and Mumbai film festivals. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Fabrica (Brighton), QUT Gallery (Brisbane), Globe Gallery (Newcastle), KK Projects (New Orleans), ICA (London).
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien'kehá:ka territory. Her practice and research explores the politics of contemporary art practice, specifically focusing on experimental and expanded cinema, and contemporary media arts. Her writings have been published in Contemp+rary, C Magazine, Critical Signals, The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Fuse Magazine, and MICE Magazine, among others.
Sheena Hoszko lives and works in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien’kehá:ka territory. A sculptor, anti-prison organizer, and Polish settler, Sheena Hoszko explores the connections between physical control of the body and mental health. Her work is based on long-term research into the power dynamics of geographical, architectural and psychological sites, and is informed by her own family’s experience of migration and incarceration. Drawing on measurement and surveying practices and transcription of oral information and stories, she interprets and recreates experiential spaces for the viewer, using materials such as light, stained glass, fabric, concrete and metal in conjunction with textual gleanings. Recently she has been focusing on the cartography of sites related to the spatial control of the body—borders, boundary lines, fences—and on possible ways of recontextualizing them as a political tool in a gallery situation.
Jakob Jakobsen is an artist and organizer who recently opened the Hospital University Prison Archive in Copenhagen. He has developed The Antihistory Project (2012-ongoing), investigating the Antiuniversity of London, established in 1968, as well as the New Experimental College of Copenhagen, established in 1962. He cofounded the trade union Unge Kunstnere og Kunstformidlere (UKK) [Young Artists and Art Mediators], Copenhagen; was professor at Funen Art Academy (Odense, Denmark); and was part of the Copenhagen Free University. With The Antiuniversity Research Project, he participated in And And And series, dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel). Jakobsen lives and works in Copenhagen and London.
Carolyn Lazard is an artist working in video, performance, and text. Their work engages collective practice to address the ecology of care, dependency, and visibility. Lazard has presented work in various spaces including Light Industry, Cleopatra’s, Recess, Anthology Film Archives, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Slought Foundation, the New Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. They have published writing in the Brooklyn Rail and Mousse Magazine and are currently writing an accessibility guide for common practice. They are a founding member of Canaries, a healing and arts collective of chronically ill women and gender non-conforming artists. Lazard holds a BA from Bard College and lives in Philadelphia where they are completing an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania.
Robyn Maynard is an author and scholar based in Toronto, where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe. Maynard is the author of two books. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Fernwood 2017) is a national bestseller, designated as one of the "best 100 books of 2017" by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus's "best books of 2018," and translated into French. Rehearsals for Living (Knopt/Haymarket, 2022) co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC National Bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for literary non-fiction. Additional writing by Maynard has appeared in The Washington Post, World Policy Journal, Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal and numerous book anthologies.
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer. Currently, she is the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She holds a Master’s in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto where she has taught graduate courses. Her curatorial projects include Rita Letendre: Fire & Light (Art Gallery of Ontario), Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (Art Gallery of Ontario), Sovereign Acts II (Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal), The Fifth World (Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon) and the award-winning KWE: Photography, Sculpture, Video and Performance by Rebecca Belmore (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto).
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and former lawyer who lives in the space-time of the city of Toronto. Author of five books of poetry, one novel, and three collections of essays, her most recent work of poetry, Zong!, is a genre-breaking, book-length poem which engages with law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. Her most recent collection of essays is BlanK (BookThug, 2017). Winner of many awards including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, and the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award, she is also a Dora Award finalist for her play Coups and Calypsos.
Jeff Reinhart works as a registered nurse in the LGBTQ Primary Care program at Sherbourne Health Centre (Toronto). There, the majority of his clients are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and other queer-identified people, and he provides nursing care to Sherbourne’s HIV Clinic—a low barrier, drop-in-based clinic for people living with HIV. He collaborates with community members and clinicians from across Canada through research, community mobilization, advocacy, and clinical care, focusing on a range of issues, including transition-related surgery, opioid overdose response, and HIV medication access and delivery.
An award-winning poet, Juliana Spahr's most recent book is That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015). She edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman, the collectively-funded Subpress with nineteen other people, and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. She has edited many anthologies, including A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011) and American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) with Claudia Rankine.
Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Mardin, Turkey. She is Associate Professor of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University and contributor to Silent University, a pedagogical platform for refugees and migrants. She is currently researching the Pearl River Delta as “territorial sea” and is leading socio-spatial discursive research on refugee camps in Turkey and Palestine. She has participated in multiple biennials and triennials, including Istanbul (2007, 2015); Lisbon (2013); Montreal (2014); Oslo (2016); and Venice (2016).
- Selected Presenters
- Alana Bartol
- Thomas Colford
- Samuel Dalivar
- Shadan Hyder
- Paul Kitz
- Cory MacKinlay
- Colleen Snell
- Heather Snell
- Declan Gould
- Karina Griffith
- Tea Hadžiristić
- Yasmeen Nematt Alla
- Matthew Robin-Nye
- Sheharyar Raza
- Jamie Ross
- Lena Suksi
- Susan Wolf
- Fan Wu
Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Her site-responsive works explore walking and divination as ways of understanding across places, species, and bodies. Bartol’s work has been presented across Canada at Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), InterAccess (Toronto), Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), Access Gallery (Vancouver), and Art Gallery of Windsor, as well as in Romania, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. Recent and upcoming residencies include Santa Fe Art Institute (USA), Eastern Edge Gallery (St. John’s), and Canadian Armed Forces Artist Program. Bartol currently lives in Calgary where she teaches at the Alberta College of Art and Design.
Originally from Cape Breton Island, Thomas Colford moved to Toronto when he was sixteen and has since danced with the likes of Janet Jackson, Shawn Mendes, and Imagine Dragons. Thomas is a passionate advocate and spent the past summer leading his mission to preserve youth art facilities in the Maritimes, raising $50,000 which benefitted five programs and buildings. Thomas moves forward fearlessly, never forgetting his mantra: “made with purpose.”
Samuel Dalivar began dance training at the age of fifteen, entering professional training with The Conteur Academy only three years later. He has worked with Eryn Waltman, Ryan Lee, Kelly Shaw, Stephanie Rutherford, Kevin Howe, Shawn Bracke, Akira Uchida, and others, including Universal Music’s production of “Deeper” by Kapri! Samuel is also involved teaching and working with young people as part of Dancers Give Back.
Shadan Hyder is an advocate for all those marginalized by the system. As an advocate, Shadan strives to work in partnership with others to effect change. In addition to practical experience, Shadan has completed studies in Child and Youth Work at George Brown College, and Child and Youth Care (CYC) at Ryerson University, where she is now an MA candidate in the CYC program.
Paul Kitz is a child and youth care practitioner, trained at Ryerson University, who has most recently worked in nature mentorship and hospice/grief work. Before being drawn to work with young people, his focus was in environmental and media advocacy. He loves to play, sing, dance, and thinks pigeons and raccoons get a bad rap.
As a recent graduate of Ryerson University’s Child and Youth Care program, Cory MacKinlay is a passionate advocate with and for youth. He is currently a contributing author to an international child and youth care publication series documenting the experiences of children in residential care systems throughout the world. To all his work, Cory brings the wisdom gathered from his own journey as an Indigenous child walking through the child protection system.
Colleen Snell has explored dance both nationally and internationally; she trained, toured, and performed with the Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre (CCDT) in Toronto and at Ladmmi in Montreal. In England, Colleen completed a Master's in Contemporary Dance with distinction at the London Contemporary Dance School. Colleen has worked with many distinguished dance practitioners, including the Hofesh Shechter Dance Company, Michael Trent, Sue MacLennan, and Andrew Harwood. Colleen is an artistic associate with TOES for Dance, a New York-Toronto dance exchange with Julliard alumni, and is a co-artistic director of a street performance company called Frog in Hand. Colleen has received choreographic commissions from Cawthra Park Repertoire Ensemble, Port Credit Buskerfest (2012, 2013), Mississauga Arts Council, TOES for Dance, and Mississauga Waterfront Festival (MWF). In December 2013, Colleen will undertake a research residency combining martial arts and dance at Movingeast in London, England. Colleen is fascinated by the written word and hopes to pursue trans-disciplinary practice-as-research as well as performance.
Heather Snell is drawn to the “in-betweens” where disciplines merge. She has participated with youth in wilderness adventures, played with toddlers in hospital settings, shared residential care with young people, advocated with youth challenged by brain injuries, and supported young people facing terminal illness. Formerly the Coordinator of Child and Youth Care (CYC) programs at Humber College, Heather is currently the Chair of Research with the Canadian CYC Education Accreditation Board, and is teaching faculty at both Ryerson and Strathclyde Universities.
Declan Gould holds an MFA from Temple University and is a PhD candidate in the Poetics program in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of the chapbooks Model Figure (Shirt Pocket Press, 2015) and "Like" or "As" (dancing girl press, 2018), and the article “‘I am/in pain’: The Form of Suffering in David Wolach’s Hospitalogy and Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto’s Waveform” (Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2017).
The films, installations and curatorial practices of Karina Griffith explore the themes of fear and fantasy, often focusing on how they relate to belonging. Griffith’s work has been shown at international galleries and festivals, and she has curated film and interdisciplinary programmes for the Goethe Institute, Berlinale Forum, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, alpha nova & galerie future, and Vtape, among others. She teaches at the Berlin University of Art as well as the NODE Centre for Curatorial Studies and is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute where her research on Black authorship in German cinema interacts with theories of affect and intersectionality. Her writing can be found in darkmatter Journal, Women in German Studies’ Special Online Section on Race and Inclusivity, Texte zur Kunst, Canadian Art, Berlin Art Link, Shadow & Act, and the Berlinale Forum Magazine.
Tea Hadžiristić is a political scientist and policy researcher whose work in Canada and the Balkans interrogates gender, poverty, inequality, labour, nationalism, and migration. She holds an MSc in International Relations Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Yasmeen Nematt Alla is an Egyptian-Canadian artist whose practice approaches current issues through sculpture and installation, frequently employing text and kinetics. She explores solitary experiences while considering how to bridge the gap between what we know and what we wish to understand. Entranced by the power of text and its ability to dialogue with the onlooker, she creates sentences that act as portraits—of herself and others who share similar circumstances.
Matthew-Robin Nye is a visual artist, curator, and PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. He is invested in “wildnesses” that resist capture and form momentary utopias; in how perception informs landscape; and in fabulation as creative practice. Nye is developing the keywords “Refugia”— that place where process go to rest and regenerate—and “The Warble”— the moment when world announces itself to perception, hinting that something is awry in its unfolding.
Sheharyar Raza is an MD candidate and trauma researcher at the University of Toronto. His current research explores trauma caused by traffic crashes, concussions, and gun violence. Past work has focused on the neuroscience of prejudice, mechanisms of addiction, and positive psychology. He was a co-organizer for the inaugural TEDx conference at the University of Toronto and founding member of Flourish, an initiative aimed at early mental health intervention for undergraduate students.
Jamie Ross is a preschool educator, witch, and self-taught visual artist based in Montreal. Queer lineage—biological and cultural—is one of his main interests and is the subject of his recent book Rousings: A Luminous Brotherhood. His most recent solo exhibition was mounted at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (Dawson City, YK) and, from April to May, 2018, he will be exhibiting simultaneously at Verticale (Laval, QC) and Eastern Bloc (Montreal), in concert with pagan men incarcerated in federal prisons in Quebec, which he visits in his capacity as a witch.
Lena Suksi has formalized her desire to know what others are feeling through horoscope readings and poetic reinterpretation. She has worked at a crisis line and in support work.
Susan Wolf is a multidisciplinary artist working from a place of empathy, exploration, and relation. She creates animations, objects, and dance-based performance. In 2017, Wolf relocated from the salty shores of Halifax to Toronto to pursue collaboration and curiosity. In addition to her art practice, she works as an educator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and accessibility coordinator at the Toronto Fringe Festival.
Fan Wu is a translator and a poet whose first book of poems, Hoarfrost & Solace (espresso, 2016), stages an encounter between the American confessional and the Chinese nature poetry traditions. He holds two MA degrees from the University of Toronto in Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies. He hosts a series of critical reading and creative writing workshops through Art Metropole, most recently focusing on the question of representing mourning and grief.
- Host
- Christine Shaw
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).
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Additional support for Running with Concepts: The Empathic Edition is provided by the Department of Visual Studies (UTM) through the Graduate Expansion Fund.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are currently open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm, Wednesdays until 8pm.
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.