Public Program

Panel Discussion: Border Talk#3: On agency, security and violence

Saturday, January 31, 2015 | 2 pm – 4 pm

Join us for a panel discussion, Border Talk #3: On agency, security and violence with artists Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell, Patrick Beaulieu, Shelagh Keeley, Osman Khan, Camille Turner, Tazeen Qayyum and Syrus Marcus Ware with moderator Andrew Herscher. Pay-what-you-can admission.

Location: AGW Lecture Room third floor, south

Bambitchell (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell) met in 2008 and have been fostering an artistic collaboration ever since. Their practice uses queer and feminist frameworks in order to reimagine borders, historical patterns of movement, labour, migration and memory. Working in various media (print, video, sculptural installation and performance), they explore these constantly shifting narratives through the use of images, architectures, language, sound and bodies. Bambitchell’s body of work investigates questions of citizenship, border-politics, mobility, justice and processes of colonialism, while foregrounding the ways in which they feel tied to very same narratives they are attempting to dismantle.

Patrick Beaulieu is a multidisciplinary artist. For the last ten years, his work has been built around the initiation of performative trajectories resulting in a corpus of visual artworks combining installations, videos, sculptures, photos and in-situ / in-socius interventions. With the collaboration of authors, philosophers and landscape architects he completed a trilogy of Transfrontier Odysseys in 2013 that consisted of following aerial trajectories of the annual migration of monarch butterflies via terrestrial paths (Vector monarca, 2007); chasing American winds over a 25-day continental tour (Ventury, 2010) and surrendering to fate and luck on the roads of chance (Vegas, 2012). His works have been presented in a variety of contexts in Canada and abroad and are part of public and private collections. He is represented by Galerie Art Mûr in Montreal.

Andrew Herscher is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of the History of Art, and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010) and The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012); he also co-founded the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, an open-access platform for research on urban crisis using Detroit as a focal point.

Shelagh Keeley studied at York University in the mid-1970s, when drawing was all but dismissed as a relevant sphere of artistic practice. Also a student of linguistics and ethnography, she took several formative trips to Africa, beginning with Nigeria in 1973, just following the Biafran War. In 1983, she made an epic 23,000-km journey by truck through Northwest, Central, and East Africa, regions that would be consumed in civil wars shortly thereafter, rendering them unrecognizable afterwards. Keeley moved from Toronto to New York in 1984, where she was based until returning to Toronto twenty-four years later.

Osman Khan is an artist interested in constructing artifacts and experiences for social criticism and aesthetic expression. His work plays and subverts the materiality behind themes of identity, home(land), social and public space through participatory & performative installations and site-specific interventions.

Khan was born in Pakistan and grew up in New York City. He received a Bachelor of Science from Columbia University. He completed his MFA at UCLA in 2004. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.

His work has been shown at MOCAD, Shanghai Biennale; L.A. Louver; Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art; Ars Electronica Center, O.K Center for Contemporary Art; Socrates Sculpture Park.

Camille Turner is a media/performance artist and educator. She is the founder of Outerregion, a company producing intercultural exchanges and dialogue. Turner’s interventions, installations and public engagements have been presented throughout Canada and internationally. Her current focus is bringing hidden and erased histories to life through place-based explorations. Turner graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design and York University’s Masters in Environmental Studies program. She teaches Art, Culture and Community Building in the New One program at University of Toronto and creates experiential learning tools and workshops for educators. 

Tazeen Qayyum is a contemporary visual artist who received her BFA from the
National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan. A Canadian artist of Pakistani origin, her work is engaging, thought provoking and critically examines our lived environment. Qayyum has shown internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, some of which include ‘Holding Pattern’ at the Toronto Pearson Airport, ‘Homecoming’, at the National Gallery of Pakistan and ‘CodeLive Metro’ at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. 

Syrus Marcus Ware is a visual artist, activist, curator and educator. He is the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program.  As a visual artist, Ware works within the mediums of painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University and The Gladstone Hotel. Ware’s recent curatorial projects include The Church Street Mural Project (Church-Wellesley Village, 2013), That’s So Gay: On the Edge (Gladstone Hotel, 2014) and Re:Purpose (Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2014).