Image Credit: Kiyan Williams, (detail) Sentient Ruin 1, 2021, soil, clay, steel, and steel armature, dimensions variable.

Exhibition: October 12 - December 15, 2021 
Artist Talk: December 15th, 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Where: Online via Zoom.

Join us over Zoom as the VAC hosts an intimate virtual discussion featuring Bodies in Conflict artist Kiyan Williams alongside Courtnay McFarlane and Oluseye on December 15th, 2021 as they discuss their multidisciplinary navigations of Black consciousness in relation to ecology, social space, body, and trans/gressive subjectivity. 

Williams’ sculptural work, which is currently featured in the VAC’s main gallery exhibition Bodies in Conflict, furthers the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual exploration of Blackness; wherein bodies are not fixed but in process of becoming, in states of ruination, oscillate in legibility, and blur the boundaries between self and other forms of sentient life. The artist meditates on the body as an assemblage and entanglement of many forms of matter—plant life, earth, light—enduring, transforming, decaying, and regenerating amidst social and environmental shifts. 

A long-time activist in Black LGBTQ2S+ communities, Courtnay McFarlane was a founding member of many groups that became forerunners in providing voice and visibility to Black LGBTQ issues in Canada —including Zami, Sepai, and AYA Men. Their curatorial practice often seeks to unearth stories of political organization and cultural activism from these communities in Toronto throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Their work draws from diverse materials such as personal archives, found imagery, video, and visual art to challenge mainstream narratives within the queer community that render the contributions of Black folx as invisible and marginal.

Oluseye’s artistic practice explores the magnitude and polyvocality of Blackness and the ways in which it moves across space, place, and time, shaping and shifting the world. Centering Yoruba cultural references in an homage to his heritage, he bends the ancestral with the contemporary and rejects the binary distinction between the traditional and the modern; the physical and the spiritual; the past and the future; what is new and what is old. Imbuing the everyday with the mythic, his work reinforces African rituals and philosophies as living, complex, and valid traditions of Black consciousness. 

About the exhibition: 

Bodies in Conflict brings together three artistic practices that examine histories of bodily traumas associated with different ingestible substances. Through several newly created site-specific installations their bodily investigations aim to critically address specific substance histories within historically-oppressed communities. Using corporeal forms that render human features not only visible, but realistic, each new artwork uses material changes to examine larger issues within different histories of Black, Indigenous, and Trans communities. Through large-scale installations and video, the artists detail the historical and ongoing subjugation of historically-oppressed communities through their relationship to specific in/organic consumed materials.  

About the speakers: 

Kiyan Williams is a visual artist and writer from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across performance, sculpture, video, and 2d realms. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Recess Art, and The Shed. Their honors and awards include the Astraea Foundation Global Arts Fund and Stanford Arts Award. They were selected to participate in the 2019 In Practice: Other Objects emerging artist exhibition at SculptureCenter and are among the inaugural cohort of artists commissioned by The Shed. Williams was previously an artist fellow at Leslie-Lohman Museum and is an alum of the EMERGENCY fellowship at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU. Williams is the recipient of the 2019/2020 Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, where they were on faculty in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department.

Courtnay McFarlane is a Jamaican-born visual artist, curator, and poet whose literary work has been published in African-Canadian and Queer anthologies. He created Legacies in Motion: Black Queer Archival Projects in 2019 and curated its first exhibition See We Yah! in April 2019. The exhibition unearthed and celebrated the political and cultural activism of Black LGBTQ communities in Toronto. See We Yah! was exhibited at BAND Gallery as part of Myseum’s Intersections Festival and later remounted at the ArQuives. His most recent curatorial project is TD’s Black History Month exhibition Joints + Junctions: PRESENTing Hogan’s Alley by Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden. 

Oluseye is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. With a primary focus on Black male subjectivity, he creates paintings, photographs, performances, and sculptures that explore the ways in which contemporary, historic and African mythologies shape notions of Blackness. He has exhibited at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Gallery 151 in New York, and Art Twenty-one in Lagos. He is a recipient of the Canada Council for The Arts New Chapter Grant, the 2019 Toronto and Ontario Arts Council Visual Arts Grants. 

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
This exhibition has been assisted by the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts, its arts funding agency.