Critical Ethics presentsTrinity Square Video’s 2016 themed commissions, which were produced over a three-month residency at the centre.

17 September–08 October 2016

Yuula Benivolski, naakita feldman-kiss, Ido Govrin, Rachel Lott and jes sachse
with parallel writing projects by Hannah Black and Megan Toye

Selected from an open call for submissions, these artists investigate what media art can offer ethical philosophy and dialogues. These new projects address the idea of critical ethics as a nuanced investigation into relational interactions between individuals, groups, technologies, environments and ideas. They embrace the complicated ethical entanglements in which we are always already embedded, exploring ethics as a site of negotiation rather than an execution of moral decrees. Critical Ethics pushes and reconfigures our understandings of ethics in the context of a highly mediated and mediatized world. What might a new philosophy of ethics seek to describe or understand in this contemporary context?

Accompanying these new media artworks are two parallel commissioned texts by Hannah Black and Megan Toye, which are part of a chapbook produced for the exhibition that can be downloaded here.

EVENTS

Opening Reception
17 September 2016, 2–5 PM
Artists in attendance.

Reading and Discussion Group
Wednesday, 28 September 2016, 7 PM
Considering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action alongside the policy demands of the Movement for Black Lives. ***Pre-reading is required.*** If you are planning to attend, please take the time to read through the calls to action, which can be downloaded here, and the policy demands, which can be found here.

Artist’s Talk with jes sachse
Saturday, 08 October 2016, 2 PM
Join the artist in a discussion about crip navigations of contemporary culture.

BIOGRAPHIES

Yuula Benivolski is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, sculpture and writing. Her work investigates social behaviours, transitional states, feelings and memory through personal narratives. She has recently exhibited at Videofag and Art Metropole in Toronto.

Hannah Black is an artist and writer currently living in Berlin. Her work is assembled from pop music and auto/biographical fragments, and draws on feminist, communist and black radical thought. Her videos have recently been shown at W139, Amsterdam; Embassy, Edinburgh; and MoMAW, Warsaw. Her writing has been published in magazines including Dazed Digital, The New Inquiry and Art in America.

naakita feldman-kiss is a Montréal-based Canadian artist and writer trained in media art and performance. Her practice explores the impact of technologies on social interactions, sharing culture and the structures of oral tradition. The artist’s works have unfolded within Internet communities and locally through relations built with strangers through these interfaces. Recent presentations of the artist’s works include New York MoMA PS1 (2012), YTB Gallery Toronto (2015), and Galerie B-312, Montréal (2016). feldman-kiss’s writing and critical analyses have been published in KAPSULA (2015) and Queer Codes (2016), among other online and print publications.

Ido Govrin is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar whose practice includes sound, installation, printmaking and text. He holds a BA in philosophy from Tel-Aviv University, an MFA from the University of Toronto and is currently a PhD candidate at Western University (London, Ontario). Recent solo exhibitions include Silent Maps (2016), To return to a place, is, like dying (2015) and Vaalbara (2014). Between 2008 and 2012, he was the director of Musica Nova ensemble. Since 2005, he has run the record label Interval Recordings.

Rachel Lott is a Toronto-based artist who envisions her work as a time stamp. Bending objects and video into the absurd, she then pushes their warped bodies up against our culture’s wall of fear and insecurity, a culture bled from our dependence on technological comforts and object fetishism. Her sculpture and video work is an extrapolation of the personal within the cultural, and of the individual within the machine of comfort production.

jes sachse is a Toronto-based poet, artist and curator obsessed with disability culture and the age of the Internet. Living across the blurred lines of autism, genetic disability, genderfluidity and madness, they are currently working on their first illustrated novel, Gutter, which portrays these dilemmas through a multi-modal narrative form. Their work and writing has appeared in NOW Magazine, The Peak, C Magazine, CV2–The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, and the 40th anniversary edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Megan Toye is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University. She completed her M.A. in Art History at McGill and worked as an assistant curator at The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, BC. She is a recipient of the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and has been published in Drain Magazine and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.