Through video, installation, performance, and software, five artists examine how legibility and classification produce value to open conversations about alternative architectures to learn from and with.
Works by Shadi Habib Allah, Shu Lea Cheang, Jeremy Laing, Lou Sheppard, and Iris Touliatou
Curated by Gia Liapi
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Blind Spot gathers the practices of Shadi Habib Allah (b. 1977, Palestine), Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954, Taiwan), Jeremy Laing (b. 1979, Canada), Lou Sheppard (b. 1982, Canada), and Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Greece). Working across installation, performance, video, and digital interfaces, these five artists destabilize various sanctioned structures—the “default settings” of technological, medical, linguistic, and archival systems—to reorient perception toward what operates beneath the visible.
They seek out blind spots in common infrastructures, from software to cellular signals, through which subjectivities are experienced and normalized, exposing systematic gaps and suggesting ways to repurpose their functions toward more complex realities and new possibilities. The artworks emphasize processes requiring bodily engagement, prompting closer attention to what is considered a given, and to who and what generate the systems and technologies we encounter every day.
Jeremy Laing’s STOCKROOM v2.0 (2026) complicates spectatorship and presentation, exposing museum storage as an infrastructure, a spatial “blind spot” within the institution. Shadi Habib Allah’s video Did You See Me This Time With Your Own Eyes? (2018) reflects on how marginalized communities’ survival technologies are reclassified depending on the point of view of the observer or narrator. Lou Sheppard’s A Strong Desire(2019/26) is an installation and performance of a score based on the text of the diagnostic criteria that provides access to transition-related medical care, exposing the illogics of regulatory systems that disregard lived experience. Shu Lea Cheang’s UTTER (2023) is an AI portrait in the form of an endlessly mutating body, accompanied by the coded parameters that determine its mutations. The work is a critical intervention into gender and racial representation, revealing AI alignment as a contemporary technology of normativity. Iris Touliatou’s SCORE FOR TONE CHANGE (2023/26) is a software intervention for museum computers that replaces their default Oxford Dictionary with Cynthia Whissell’s Dictionary of Affect in Language, activating a daily practice of affect within the institution.
This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.
Opening Reception: 2026 MVS Curatorial Studies Graduating Exhibitions
Wednesday, May 6, 6pm–8pm
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
Our Supporters
We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award and International Travel Fund.
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Image: Shu Leah Cheang, UTTER (detail), 2023. 36-minute video loop. Image courtesy of the artist.
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