Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs | Opening Reception | September 29, 7pm

September 30, 2018 to December 30, 2018

Shannon Bool • Natalie Czech • Fabiola Carranza •  Raven Chacon (with Laura Ortman and Suzanne Kite) • Leah Decter • Sameer Farooq & Jared Stanley • Theaster Gates • Hassan Khan • Ken Lum • Sylvia Matas • Jeanne Randolph.

Curated by Sarah Nesbitt and Jenifer Papararo

Artist Talk with Shannon Bool
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Sameer Farooq, Jeanne Randolph & Jared Stanley in conversation
Friday, September 28, 2018
Nuit Blanche Opening
Saturday, September 29, 2018 | 7pm – 1am
Panel Discussion with Raven Chacon, Laura Ortman & Suzanne Kite
Saturday, September 29 , 2018 | 6pm
Performances by Laura Ortman & Suzanne Kite
Saturday, September 29, 2018 | 8pm
Artist Talk by Ken Lum
Thursday, November 1, 7pm |

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is eager to announce the opening of our fall exhibition, Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs.Structured around general notions of indexing, collecting, cloaking and the reveal with a focus on material and an overlay of poetry – the exhibition is grounded in the use of text, often found, poetry, and the everyday, with historical and political narratives interwoven as material, including the popular Black cultural magazine Jet in Theaster Gates’s work Do I Know You, 2017; the Haitian Declaration of Independence in Liberté ou la morte by Fabiola Carranza; strip mall signage in Ken Lum’s 117 Dwight Eisenhower Blvd; and in recently uncovered medieval graffiti in All Saints Bench, 2018 by Shannon Bool.

Natalie Czech, Hassan Khan, and Sylvia Matas present language using banal everyday signifiers: magazine print ads, LED signage, or newspaper clippings, which they parse into poetic and political gestures. Jeanne Randolph, and Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley activate collections through ficto-criticism (Randolph) and speculative museums (Farooq and Stanley), and Leah Decter, like Carranza, excavates language from the archive of her maternal grandfather’s ship’s manifest coming in to Canada in her woven work, (through)line(age) 1779-1925-2013, 2013. As part of the exhibition Raven Chacon begins a new book project in dedication to the life of Zitkála-Šá, an early 20th century Yankton Dakota woman that will be comprised of twelve musical scores dedicated to twelve contemporary Indigenous women “working in the field of contemporary music performance or composition.”

The exhibition is to be read as one moves through it. Through a paring of objects and texts, how histories are captured and presented surface in prosaic terms, but carry the weight of history’s missteps and misrepresentations.

– Curated by Sarah Nesbitt and Jenifer Papararo