Days of Reading | Curatorial Tour by Sarah Nesbitt

This Saturday, (Dec. 15) JOIN US at 3PM, as co-curator, Sarah Nesbitt conducts a FREE guided tour of our current exhibition, “Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs”. Anyone and everyone’s invited to participate! Cost: FREE (like all of our programming).

*This is our last public program in relation to Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs so please take this opportunity to visit the exhibition and learn about the processes and ideas behind this exhibition.

Did you know that Plug In ICA offers FREE guided tours and educational programs? We invite student groups to participate in our learning programs that include in-depth curriculum guides customized for each exhibition.

For more information on this and our other education programs, contact Luther Konadu at luther@plugin.org. For general information please contact: info@plugin.org or call 1.204.942.1043

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INFORMATION ABOUT DAYS OF READING: BEYOND THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art presents, 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, poetic, and colloquial, 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, 2009; and in recently uncovered medieval graffiti in All Saints Bench , 2018 by Shannon Bool.
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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.
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As part of the exhibition Raven Chacon begins a new book project in dedication to the life of, 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.”
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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.
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Acknowledgments:
Plug In ICA extends our heartfelt gratitude to our generous donors, valued members, and dedicated volunteers. We acknowledge the sustaining support of our Director’s Circle. You all make a difference.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We could not operate without their continued financial investment and lobbying efforts.

Plug In ICA relies on community support to remain free and accessible to all, and enable us to continue to present excellent programs. Please consider becoming a member of Plug In ICA and a donor at https://plugin.org/support or by contacting Angela Forget: angela@plugin.org
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Installation shot of Natalie Czech’s, “A poem by repetition by Robert Grenier 2,” 2017. [far left]. | Leah Decter’s, “(through)line(age) 1779-1925-2013,” 2013. [centre] & Natalie Czech’s, “A poem by repetition by Vsevolod Nekrasov 2,” 2015. [far right]. Photo credit: Karen Asher