Don’t Miss: Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts
A self-portrait by Montréal-based multidisciplinary artist Kama La Mackerel from the series Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard. Photo: Dominic Chan.
PSA: The stellar group exhibition Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts, which has resided in the Jackman Humanities Institute since last fall, closes tomorrow. I first wrote about it in the Opaloma newsletter, and here I’m sharing more details for any folks who missed that dispatch.
Featuring the work of Kasra Jalilipour, Jordan King, Kama La Mackerel, Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, and Lan “Florence” Yee, Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts was curated by Dallas Fellini, the winner of the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators and who just received their Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies from U of T. In addition to Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts, Fellini’s curatorial thesis show, Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances, is on view at the Art Museum’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery until July 27th (this gallery is located just a few blocks away from the Jackman Humanities Institute building, so catch both shows if you can!).
Each exhibition explores “the roles of absence and opacity in rendering trans and queer lives and archives”, according to Indiscernible thresholds’ text, with Mnemonic Silences, disappearing acts specifically responding “to the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2023–24 research theme Absence. [T]his exhibition interrogates the gaps that puncture the queer and trans archive, making visible their political nature and proposing strategies for a future of queer and trans history-making that refuses the lens of the oppressor. Through fiction-making, critical imagining, and revisionism, the artists in Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts gesture at and supplement histories of queer and trans people that are insufficient, compromised, colonial, or simply absent.”
When I asked Fellini when they started to notice these absences with specific regard to their curatorial work, they note that “It came before my schooling, when I was seeking out queer and trans histories. It hasn’t come up as much in my current work and research, but on a personal level, I’m interested in learning about queerness and adjacent identities in the Middle Ages and earlier, for example.”
Here, Fellini shouts out two books – John Boswell’s Same-sex unions in Pre-Modern Europe and Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors – as having roles in their developing an understanding of what Fellini describes as a “history that’s largely informed by absence and censorship.”
“Both of these books have been criticized as being a bit anachronistic,” Fellini adds, “but I think it's honorable to do that work of seeking out these histories and trying to ‘restore’ them.”
Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Tape Condition: degraded, 2016. Mixed-media installation on pegboard, dimensions variable. Photo: Dominic Chan.
However, Fellini says that they’re “less interested in restorative acts right now, and more so in artists who are working alongside the archive, or in conversation with the archive, or even in acts of refusal against the archive, because I do see it as a structure that impedes on queer and trans peoples’ ability to self-determinate and live liberated lives.” A few minutes later, Fellini says something that has stuck with me when considering how to describe the show: “I think that absence can be generative.”
Indeed, the works in Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts singularly and collectively emanate a strong sentiment of expansion and growth. From Meyer and McKinney’s bright pink pegboard installation to Yee’s illuminating embroidered fabric works, these pieces call out the fact that, as the exhibition text says, “When trans and queer histories enter the archive, the conditions upon which they are absorbed are often those of surveillance, criminalization, coloniality, and degradation.” If, as it goes on, these histories and experiences are even entered at all. This exhibition, then, is an arena for intervention and assertion – a declaration of that self-determination that Fellini points to.
A selection of Mauritian-Canadian Kama La Mackerel’s gorgeous self-portraits, for instance, evoke breezy vacation postcard scenes which posit the artist’s queer and transgender body at the forefront of landscapes that have historically been commodified to highlight “a dream of exoticism, a promise of isolation, a return to a space of innocence, emptiness and ‘authentic’ connection with nature, untainted by civilization.” The accompanying text for the series continues: “According to this colonialist logic, Mauritian subjecthood cannot be featured in these colourful pieces of glossy cardboard that act as ambassadors to the island.”
Jordan King, Untitled, 2020. Polaroid, 3.5 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
The theme of imaginative communication is prevalent in this show, and beautifully realized in Kasra Jalilipour’s riveting video work Gut Feelings: Fragments of Truth (which you can watch here if you’re not able to make it to the exhibition). The work features a tenderly written letter reading, with the receiver of the message meant to be 19th century Persian royal Taj al-Saltaneh who was the subject of a viral meme a few years ago that, as the video relays, reinforced egregious beauty standards and bigotry.
And there’s a distinct dialogue present in Jordan King’s collection of photographs presented in the show. Some are focused on the artist herself, and others are culled from an extraordinary cache King came to possess after living in the New York apartment once occupied by legendary trans performer International Chrysis; a once notable figure in the city’s entertainment scene, but who had fallen into relative obscurity after her death in 1990. The glamorous shots of King and Chrysis are juxtaposed, illuminating a sense of continued history that is at once shared and yet individual.
King, who also recently received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Curatorial Practice at OCAD University in Toronto this Spring, says that “when [my] photo essay was shot, I was obviously channeling some of that energy”, pointing to International Chrysis’ captivating aura. “But I wasn't trying to embody [her].” One feels a sense of interplay and homage mixed with potent self-possession when looking at the assortment of images that characterizes a visual traversing of timelines between two charismatic figures.
And this is what stands out to me most about Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts – how the works within vibrate with a collaborative sense of reflection and forward-moving, cultivating an abundant presence of power.
Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts closes at 4:30pm on Friday, June 21st.
