The Curatorial Incubator: V. 16, Living in Hope
love as rupturous as I know it to be. Vtape, Toronto, ON. March 2021.
Video exhibition as part of The Curatorial Incubator: V. 16, Living in Hope. Featuring works by Shelley Niro, Ursula Biemann, prOphecy sun, and Sharon Isaac.
Curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan
love as rupturous as I know it to be
Becoming a new mom in a global pandemic has been an experience that’s shaped me in ways I cannot yet know, but know are extraordinary. My heart’s new colossal capacity has prompted me to consider anew a genuine ethics of care that reaches beyond the performative care I see unfolding in a variety of cultural and political settings today. love as rupturous as I know it to be ponders caring otherwise, prioritizing action while envisioning a radical unbounded love. Intuitively, instinctively, and uninterested in aesthetic distance, I selected works that spoke to me viscerally. I was guided by a desire to explore relationships that exceed those that are strictly between humans to include those that exist between plants, animals, and things, and merge into minerals, energy, land, stars and waters. Curator Tarah Hogue once described how the work of Michif artist Christi Belcourt “nurture[s] relations through kinship networks that are place-based, inter-species and otherworldly, and in turn demonstrates, through beauty, strength and wonder, that other (to colonial capitalist) ways of being in relation to one another and to the earth are both possible and desperately urgent.”(1) These other ways of being have inspired me in thinking through what a hopeful future might feel like.
The title of this series is an excerpt from an essay(2) by Karyn Recollet that imagines cosmic kinship and imagines the potent magic of dark matter—the vibrant power of imagining elsewise. These videos symbolize an ethos of generosity—a central tenant for intimate practices of care in a world wildly in need of renewal. They simultaneously index the grave responsibility necessary if ongoing flourishing of life is to be sustained. Understanding that all our complex and fragile interactions are inextricably linked requires acknowledging our dependency, collective need, grief, and reciprocity as basic elements of being. Transformation calls for a rebirth of the world as we know it and demands we are brave enough to face the troubling vulnerability and shattering affective burden of living in hope.
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1 Hogue, Tarah. “Walking Softly with Christi Belcourt.” Canadian Art. June 21, 2017.
2 Recollet, Karyn. “Kinstillatory Gathering.” c mag, Issue 136.