Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of TPW Gallery, Toronto
The concept of self has changed through history, in correspondence with other cultural determinants. The subjectivity demanded by today’s dominant economic system — capitalism — is characterized by competitive individualism: we build our unique and separate identities through our consumption patterns. As we become increasingly aware of the limits and dangers of that system — deepening social injustice; military, commercial, and industrial destruction of planetary life — we chafe within its ideological constraints. How can we become the kinds of subjects capable of making the change we crave? Could love bind us together in struggle, within and against the unloving system that holds us? Curators Pip Day and Irmgard Emmelhainz explore this question in Gallery TPW’s moving-image installation Does the oyster sleep?
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