About the Event

Join the Art Museum for a dynamic discussion moderated by writer and curator Lise Ragbir in conversation with curator and creative director Ingrid Jones, artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, cultural worker and curator La Tanya S. Autry, and award-winning author and poet Chantal Gibson. This conversation will delve into the powerful themes and artists showcased in Labour, an exhibition that includes text, film, and installation works of panelists Tanya Lukin Linklater, La Tanya S. Autry and Chantal Gibson, alongside Natalie Asumeng, Tony Cokes, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Martine Syms. Together, they will explore critical questions such as: What motivates our inclusion in institutional spaces? Who holds the right to tell our stories? How can we express justified rage against microaggressions and discrimination? And how can rest be wielded as a form of resistance?

Performances and Incantations

The panel will open with a sonic introduction by Michael Shand, Sekou Lumumba and Richard Grossman and will conclude with a poetic outro by poetic writer, community organizer and cultural curator Farhia Tato.

This event is free and all are welcome. Registration is recommended.
 

About Labour

Inspired by Claudia Rankine’s scholarship on microaggressions in Citizen: An American Lyric and themes of perceptibility, Labour seeks to unveil the invisible labour of the colonized. The exhibition challenges societal racial biases through the lens of Blackness and Indigeneity, exploring, among other concerns, how unseen labour might be unburdened and shifted onto the dominant. The evocative works of Natalie Asumeng, La Tanya S. Autry, Tony Cokes, Chantal Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Martine Syms examine white supremacy’s manifestation in institutional power paradigms and its corrosive effects on Black and Indigenous people and people of colour. In so doing, this exhibition operationalizes and reveals unseen labour while activating alternative teachings from Black and Indigenous perspectives. Labour asks, what are the motivations for our inclusion in institutional spaces? Who has the right to tell our stories? What is our right to rage in the face of microaggressions and discriminatory acts? And how can we employ much-needed rest as a form of resistance? Featuring an electrifying mix of audio, video, textual, and immersive works, Labour creates a powerful sensory experience that disrupts conventional narratives. By reimagining how the colonized perceive, engage with, and ultimately challenge the forces that shape our world, Labour becomes a powerful site of defiance.

The exhibition is presented by the Art Museum and is currently on view at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Hart House. 

About the Panelists

La Tanya S. Autry is an art historian, educator, curator, and writer, who believes in making cultural work liberatory praxis. She co-produced the global movement Museums Are Not Neutral and has created exhibitions and programming via institutions and independent projects.

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head-on, reimagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her altered texts, installations and graphic poetry collections bring a critical lens to the historical mis/representation Black womanhood across cultural media. She is the author of How She Read (2019) and with/holding (2021).

Ingrid Jones is an independent curator, creative director, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice critically examines marginalization and refusal, particularly the erasure of Black scholarship, the commodification of Blackness, and the unseen labor of BIPOC artists and cultural workers. Her notable exhibitions include Liberation in Four Movements (2024), Nostalgia Interrupted (2022), Wild Rose (2018), IDENTITY (2018), and Poor But Sexy: The Outtakes (2010). Jones has developed lectures and masterclasses for Sheridan College and Toronto Metropolitan University, focusing on photography, art direction, and the interplay between art movements and sociopolitical events. She has received the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award for research excellence and was nominated in 2023 for Exhibition of the Year over 20K by Galeries Ontario Galleries. Her collaborative work and writing have appeared in Globe Style, Computer Arts Projects UK, Vice Berlin, Waddington’s, and Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education.

Tanya Lukin Linklater undertakes embodied inquiry in rehearsal, performance, works for camera, installation, works on paper, and writing. Her recent exhibitions include Aichi Triennale, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Toronto Biennial of Art. Inner blades of grass (soft) (cured) (bruised by weather), including works from the last ten years and new commissions, was presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in summer 2024. Her Sugpiaq homelands are in southern Alaska. She lives in Nbisiing Anishnaabeg aki.

Lise Ragbir has dedicated her 20-year career to creating access to a range of art experiences. She has worked with corporate and public collections, non- and for-profit organizations, and organized exhibitions featuring artists Dawoud Bey, Genevieve Gaignard, Jacob Lawrence, and Deborah Roberts, among others. She is the co-editor of Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture (2020), and her essays about race, identity, immigration, and cultural representation have appeared in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Artnet, The Guardian, Time Magazine, USA Today, The Boston Globe and other publications. Lise is a graduate of Harvard University’s Museum Studies program.

Farhia Tato is a poetic writer, community organizer, and cultural curator. She seeks to confront the limitations of a culture built on exclusivity and resistance to difference, advocating for concepts like hybridity, creolization and gender fluidity. Farhia is the founder of Tender Possibilities, a poetry reading group and creative placemaking initiative, and this year’s Poet-in-Residence at Gallery TPW.

This event is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and is presented in partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto.