From the outset, Lan \u201cFlorence\u201d Yee\u2019s printed fabric gently billows from the breeze created by the audience entering the gallery. Suspended from a free-standing spruce-wood structure, these makeshift curtains depicting walls of glass blocks feel both delicate and inviting. In Tangerine, After Grapefruit <\/em>(2022\u201324), Yee pays tribute to and reconceptualizes Yoko Ono\u2019s artist book from 1964, thoughtfully giving it architectural heft. Using textiles to spatialize their own series of embroidered performative instructions combined with images printed on fabric, Yee creates a poetic site that reflects on queer intersubjectivity and identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Lan$
Lan “Florence” Yee<\/strong>
Tangerine, After Grapefruit<\/em>, 2022-24, installation view, MAI, Montr\u00e9al, 2022.
Photo: David Wong, courtesy of MAI, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Just a few steps away, Shaya Ishaq\u2019s stunning video projection a boundless love<\/em> (2024) picks up from the weightlessness of Yee\u2019s installation. Against a background of blue sky and white clouds, a floating digitized handweaving draws from Ishaq\u2019s Lugbara and Nubi lineage of matriarchs in a speculative environment connecting ancestral knowledge, rituals of passing, and transmission. \u201cDeath is inevitable, but time feels like another beast,\u201d observes a narrative voice that lures us deep into Ishaq\u2019s immersive worldbuilding. Devastatingly honest and beautifully simple, the work continues to inhabit viewers even after they walk away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Shaya-Ishaq$
Shaya Ishaq<\/strong>
a boundless love<\/em>, installation view, MAI, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: David Wong, courtesy of MAI, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In aksanti 33 <\/em>(2023\u2013ongoing), Po B. K. Lomami collapses time and space by showing fragments of an ongoing performance connecting family, physical and emotional pain, and the hazards of the medical-industrial complex and big pharma. Lomami\u2019s commanding altar stands in for an embodied process of discovery: from finding a medicine that connects them back to their aunt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to sharing with their own, more local community, to how bodies, stories, and relationships are linked together through visible and invisible forces. The impressive installation, which includes a suspended microphone that senses people moving around the work, literally responds to its audience with flickering lights and a projection that retells the genesis of aksanti 33<\/em>. This cyclical, self-sustaining manifestation furthers the life of the performance, creating a sense of infallible perpetuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Po-B.-K.-Lomami$
Po B. K. Lomami<\/strong>
aksanti 33<\/em>, 2023-ongoing, installation view MAI, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: Po B. K. Lomami, courtesy of MAI, Montr\u00e9al
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This sense of lingering, of something underlying the overall narrative arc of our lives, is fully materialized in Zinnia Naqvi\u2019s photographic series The Professor\u2019s Desk <\/em>(2023). Through intimate and colourful fictionalized images depicting a professor\u2019s desk constructed from the archives of the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance, Naqvi exposes four cases of discrimination in or related to Canadian universities spanning from the 1970s to today. Mixing the personal with the political, the quotidian with the outstanding, these collages demonstrate how non-white individuals and communities have continually fought against violence on campuses despite academic institutions\u2019 so-called progressive values. Each image is captivating and filled with clear intention, utmost precision, and layered meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Zinnia-Naqvi$
Zinnia Naqvi<\/strong>
The Professor\u2019s Desk<\/em>, 2023, installation view, MAI, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: David Wong, courtesy of MAI, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Naqvi\u2019s impactful imagery, which references events such as Professor Kin-Yip Chun\u2019s case of racial discrimination against the University of Toronto, echoes the importance of rising up to fight against different forms of institutional oppression. Today, it is impossible not to think of the student-led campus protests demanding divestment from Israel for the genocide it is perpetrating against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip. These undercurrents, running through The Traces That Remain<\/em>, are at the very heart of b\u00e9lidor\u2019s curatorial premise, a self-described \u201climinal space, a zone where we can transit through the traces that remain of these moments that finally see the light of day, allowing us to apprehend them.\u201d What remains after leaving the exhibition, resonating in the flesh and bones of those who have spent time with it, is its call for solidarity in the face of violence and destruction, for resilience, hope, and beauty in the form of care, community, and proximity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montr\u00e9al, Didier Morelli holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University. His writing has been published in Art Journal<\/em>, Canadian Theatre Review<\/em>, C Magazine<\/em>, Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, RACAR<\/em>, Theatre Research in Canada<\/em>, and The Drama Review<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n
Didier Morelli, Lan \u201cFlorence\u201d Yee, Po B. K. Lomami, Shaya Ishaq, Zinnia Naqvi<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Montr\u00e9al, arts interculturels (MAI)<\/strong>
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