Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present:
Magic Keystrokes and Glitter with Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware & Kamran Behrouz
July 10 – 22, 2023
Participant Presentations | 6 – 8pm | July 12, 2023
Open Studio | 6 – 9pm | July 21, 2023
Plug In ICA is thrilled to announce a two-week artistic and curatorial digital justice residency, Magic Keystrokes and Glitter.
From July 10 – July 22, 2023, Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware and Kamran Behrouz will structure and direct the residency which will take place in our galleries. The program will consist of remote and in-person collaboration of ideas, best practices sharing and art curation design in the digital realm. This project will leave the community with a collection of open-source information that will be a starting off or continuation of broader dialogues in the sector. It will centre around rethinking intersectional digital justice with a cohort of 6 international artist/thinkers invited by Ware and Behrouz.
In conjunction with this residency, we will be hosting two events. Please join us on July 12 for an informal gathering where the participants will have a chance to connect with the community and share presentations about their practice. On July 21 we will be hosting an open studio style event, where the artists will be presenting their research from the residency.
Stay tuned for more details about these events to come.
Faculty
Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Using painting, installation, and performance, Syrus works with and explores social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including solo shows at Grunt Gallery in 2018 (2068:Touch Change) and Wil Aballe Art Projects in 2021 (Irresistible Revolutions). His work has been featured as part of the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019 in conjunction with the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)), as well as for the Bentway’s Safety in Public Spaces Initiative in 2020 (Radical Love).
Syrus has participated in group shows at the Never Apart in Montreal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Won’t Back Down). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016 & 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015).
Kamran Behrouz, ABD, (1984) is a Visual Artist, born and raised in Tehran, currently working and living in Zurich. Their PhD, entitled ‘Cosmopolitics of the Body’, uses posthuman critical theory as a navigational tool to examine the boundaries of bodies and humanity’s embedded and embodied cultures. They work with multiple medias, and combines the act of painting with animation, installations, motion capture, and (virtual)performance. Their works deal with ‘politics of location’ in association with Cosmopolitics. Kamran saturates the Queer Identity throughout their art, in order to draw a cartography of belonging and displacement. Politics of image center their visual practices, transfigured in their theoretical works, as cultural translations, coding and textual trafficking. Kamran’s latest research is related to the translation of queer-feminist texts such Sara Ahmed’s latest essay into Persian language (a language that does not register gender), and immersive art as a form of knowledge production/distribution.
Participants
micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press (2022), proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations won the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is co-editor of the book series Queer/Trans/Digital at NYU Press, with Amanda Philips and Bo Ruberg. She is a first generation Colombian American.
Her solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries and biennials including the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece, Arnolfini Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, the Zero1 Biennial and the California Biennial. cárdenas is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0.
Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit, multidisciplinary artist, educator, mediator, and somatic practitioner whose mother is from Treaty Four, Manitoba.
Davis was born and raised in Michi Saagig Territory, also known as tkaronto, Toronto, Ontario. Davis weaves their passions for land-based and archival research, with calls to action, healing, and works embodied by lived and intergenerational experience. A parent of three sons, Davis works within the mediums of performance, movement, visual arts, and sound/media. Davis fuses narratives of colonization, race, gender, disability, transformative justice, abolition, pleasure, and 2-Spirit/Indigiqueer identity in their work. Davis’ performance practice bravely embodies their relationship to colonial systems, police and medical violence, systemic oppression, complex histories, and most importantly equitable, regenerative, thriving, and community-centered art and futures.
Evan Ifekoya is an artist whose work in community organising, installation, performance, sound, text and video is an extension of their calling as a spiritual practitioner. They view art as a site where resources can be both redistributed and renegotiated, whilst challenging the implicit rules and hierarchies of public and social space. Through archival and sonic investigations, they speculate on blackness in abundance. Strategies of space holding through architectural interventions, ritual, sound and workshops enable them to make a practice of living in order not to turn to despair.
Mentah L’autentika
Mentah is a Uruguayan performer, filmmaker and narrator. They went from being a cartoonist child to a cinemafilmx teenager, to blossom into a young militant storyteller in any be the platform. Storytelling is, without a doubt, their comfort zone. Although they trained as a screenwriter and director, the first few years out of academia were spent in the performance (drag/happening) and never having let go of drawing.
Their work oscillates between the creation of new identities and their eventual destruction, aiming to reconfigure our aesthetic thinking, to rethinking make-up as a weapon, to resist inside technology and not against it. Mentah knits their discourse in texts that are first and foremost published in Uruguay, and then shared in their artistic interventions in any geographical context. Mixing the two disciplines is fundamental to their work, enabling a thinking process that could exist in a workshop as much as in new academic systems.
Kim Ninkuru is a multimedia artist from Bujumbura, in Burundi, currently residing in Toronto. She uses performance art, installation, video, spoken word and movement to create pieces that give her the chance to explore and express rage, love, desire, beauty, or pain in relation to her own body and mind.
Her work heavily questions our preconceived notions of gender, race, sexuality and class. It is grounded in the firm belief that blackness is past, present and future at any given moment.
RANdom
Womantís Random is a storytelling media-acrobat*, trans_lating person, book_illustrator* and poet at heart. She graduated at York University in Toronto (Master in Gender, Women and Feminist Studies) and currently is based in Berlin.
Acknowledgments
We are on Treaty 1 Territory. Plug In ICA is located on the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the National homeland of the Red River Métis. Our water is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nations.
Plug In ICA extends our heartfelt gratitude to the artists we work with, 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.
Magic Keystrokes and Glitter is made possible by a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts’ Strategic Funds Program, Digital Now component.
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 Caitlin Thomas-Dunn at caitlin@plugin.org.
For more information on public programming and exhibitions contact Luther Konadu at luther@plugin.org.
For general information, please contact: info@plugin.org or call 1.204.942.1043