Attunement Sessions

Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

I designed the Attunement Sessions as part of a public light box program called Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. The program offered pedagogic tools to assist audiences with “tuning-in” to each image set in ways that reach beyond solely seeing. Each of these sessions provides a series of performative instructions that are situated within specific historical and spatial contexts. The program’s intention is to guide observers by means of embodiment, perception, texture, joy, meditation, encounter, touch, intimacy, sound, intuition, or other senses so often dismissed in viewing and archival habits. Six interdisciplinary practitioners have been commissioned to respond to a particular image set with an assemblage of prompts that challenge viewers to open to new ways of understanding what we “see.” This exercise reveals multisensory and resonant methods of engaging these works through multiple forms of connection. Like Black feminist theorist Tina Campt describes in her book Listening to Images, to make contact with an image one must attune to certain frequencies of encounter that aren’t always available in our normal register. These sessions and their varied attunements incite just that, fostering participation that confronts and reaches beyond our familiar modes of encounter.