of movement and dwelling explores the visible and invisible architectures that shape one’s sense of place through the lens of displacement and resettlement.

13 January–11 March 2017
Tings Chak, Felix Kalmenson, and the collective of Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko

curated by Farah Yusuf

Trinity Square Video is excited to present of movement and dwelling, guest curated by Farah Yusuf. The exhibition proposes that a dwelling is more than a physical structure used for the bounding and occupying of space—its construction and habitation are invested with social and symbolic meaning. Just as we inhabit a place, it inhabits us. It is by considering the idea of home through the experience of displacement that we may gain insight into the political, economic, territorial, cultural and social forces that exert influence on our precarity or rootedness within any place.

These artists each present an architectural trace of mobility wherein they confront the idea of home as an affective framework and built structure existing within and through the governance of the state. Tings Chak’s site-specific installation responds to an earlier body of research about the Chinese indentured workers who built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Her 1:1 scale interpretation of a worker’s home examines the precarity of living conditions for the thousands who immigrated and died during the construction of the line. Faraz Anoushahpoor, Parastoo Anoushahpoor and Ryan Ferko consider the empirical gaze, technological progress and unnatural disaster that contributed to the forced relocation of entire communities near Cornwall, Ontario. As part of an ongoing series of artworks centered on the Saint Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, this iteration is based on the final images of the Lost Villages that were documented by the Research Council of Canada in 1958 when they burned eight buildings to ground in a controlled experiment. Felix Kalmenson negotiates his own migration from Leningrad, USSR and his return 27 years later to Saint Petersburg, Russia through a re-filming of his family’s departure video. Stripped of their citizenship with no guarantee of return, the original video documents the family’s last moments on native soil visiting main tourist sites, while Kalmenson’s recreation observes a city that transitioned to neoliberal capitalism in their absence. Together these works reveal that the idea of home is more than a neutral sum of its parts.

This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council’s Culturally Diverse Curatorial Projects grant.

EVENTS

Opening Reception
Friday, 13 January 2017, 5–7 PM
Artists in attendance

Artists’ Talk and Publication Launch
Saturday, 18 February 2017, 2 PM

BIOGRAPHIES

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko have worked in collaboration since 2013. Often working in relation to specific sites, their projects explore collaboration as a way to upset the authority of a singular narrator. Currently based in Toronto, recent film and installation work has been shown at Projections (New York Film Festival), Wavelengths (Toronto International Film Festival), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (Germany), Portland International Film Festival, Media City Festival (Windsor/Detroit), Experimenta (Bangalore), Crossroads Festival (San Francisco), ZK/U Centre for Art & Urbanistics (Berlin) and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography (Toronto).

Tings Chak is a Hong Kong-born and Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and migrant justice organizer, whose work draws inspiration from anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles. Trained in architecture, she was awarded the Kuwabara-Jackman Thesis Gold Medal for her research on the immigration detention centres, which culminated in the 2014 graphic novel, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention. This book explores the politics of architectural design and representation in mass incarceration. Her work has been exhibited, presented and published across North America, Europe and Hong Kong.

Felix Kalmenson is a Russian-born artist, with a practice in installation and video. His work is concerned with the mediation of histories and contemporary narratives by political, institutional and corporate bodies examining how innovations in the field of communication and technology serve to redefine publicness, sovereignty and power.

Farah Yusuf is an independent curator and writer based in Toronto. She holds an MA in Experimental Digital Media from the University of Waterloo and a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices at OCAD University where she was the recipient of the Curatorial Practice Medal and Governor General’s Academic Medal. Past curatorial projects include Eutopia at the Textile Museum of Canada, Corpus Lucida: 12th Annual Emerging Artist Exhibition at InterAccess Media Art Centre, Babel on Rosetta Stone at Gallery 1313 and Future Forward at OCADU for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in 2011. Her writing has appeared in C Magazine.

.