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Artspeak,

Artspeak

Andrea Fatona

Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by “other” Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, “culture” and “education” can be employed to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Fatona has published scholarly articles, catalogue essays and book chapters in a range of publications.Some examples of her curatorial projects include: Queer Collaborations (1993), Across Borders (1995/6), Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History (1999), The Attack of the Sandwich Men (2001), Reading the Image: Poetics of the Black Diaspora (2006-2008), Fibred Optics (2009-10), Will Work for Food (2011), Land Marks (2013-14) and Settling in Place (2018).

Exhibitions

  • The Flotilla Tortilla

    DIANNA FRID
    February 24–March 31, 1995

  • Supposing it was your sister…

    WENDY COBURN
    October 14–November 12, 1994

    Curated by Andrea Fatona and Erin O’Brien

    In Toronto, some time in 1990, I garbage picked a box containing subpoenas, indictments, testimonies, and evidence from a series of court hearings dated 1920. These official documents were all connected to the case of the alleged rape of an 18 year-old white woman from Duluth, Minnesota and the ensuing riot and brutal lynching of three African-American men at the hands of a white mob. Seventy years after the fact I had become witness to the murderous rallying power of the white mob in the name of protecting white womanhood. The graphic evidence from these trials, that blatant racism and common complicity of white men, women, and children, threw me into the vortex of all I had taken for granted, my whiteness. This was at a time when I was struggling to understand oppressive social constructions of my own identity as a woman and a lesbian. But what privileges and protections had I been afforded, raised in a white middle-class, Protestant family in a colony of Britain and what were the conditions and the costs of those privileges?

    This multi-channel video installation is a presentation of my working process towards an interrogation of whiteness and provides a glimpse of some of the unedited source material, issues, and physical elements I am attempting to condense into a single channel video with the same title.

    The television reports on the Business Bar raid and the MUC police shooting of Marcellus Francois are from Montreal, 1991-1992. Far from a phenomenon of the past, lynching is practiced today through disciplinary measures for crimes more often imagined than real, or through extreme punishments that far outweigh the reality of the crimes themselves.

    —Wendy Coburn

  • Racing thru Space

    DANA CLAXTON, ROY KIYOOKA, NANCY LALICON, ASHOK MATHUR, SUR MEHAT, MELINDA MOLLINEAUX, SHANI MOOTOO, NHAN DUC NGUYEN, MOHAMMAD SALEMY, HENRY TSANG, SHARYN YUEN
    June 25–July 23, 1994

    An exhibition organized in conjunction with the Writing thru Race Writers’ Conference.