TPAC is pleased to announce 7a*mgr8 [migrate], an online digital residency project featuring new projects by Sean Lee, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Abedar Kamgari.
For this project, TPAC invited three Ontario-based artists to create new digital projects for our website that are inspired by our public web archive.
Performances live by animating bodies, and by the way a work’s gestures and images get taken up in daily life, evolving and adapting to new situations and contexts. 7a*mgr8’s creative residents enter into dialogue with the documents and performances in our archive: to call attention to key and still relevant ideas and approaches; to intervene in and enrich the works’ ongoing histories; to make space for new perspectives; and, in essence, to explore how performance impulses can migrate through different media and expanding communities.
Sean Lee’s almost audio described
Online from May 22, 2024
Using the disabled body as a site of spontaneity, Sean Lee’s response to Lee Wen’s Almost Untitled: End of the World Stories (2006) employs audio description as an action of cross disability solidarity. Although audio description is typically polished, pre-written and recorded through multiple takes and edits, this piece challenges the performer to take on audio description as a gesture of endurance. In the artist’s words, “As the performance unfolds, my discomfort intensifies, reflected in the physicality of my movements, tapping the rod in my back, shuffling on the chair in place, and the evolving and degrading quality of the audio description.”
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Stone, stick, star
Online from June 5, 2024
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Stone, stick, star finds its inspiration in Rebecca Belmore’s performance, For Dudley (1997). Referencing the tragic deaths of Ojibwa protester Dudley George in 1995 at Ipperwash, and Saulteaux teenager Neil Stonechild in 1990 in Saskatoon, Lukin Linklater’s two-part digital work (photographs and video) presents her two daughters performing with simple materials: rocks, sticks, woolen blankets (starlit and tartan), and long sheaths of paper stained with dried raspberry. Lukin Linklater writes, “Like the women from my Sugpiaq homelands, my gestures are bodily, material, affective, and intellectual, often happening in the home before moving out into the world.”
Abedar Kamgari
Date and description TBA
About the Artists
Sean Lee (he/they) is an artist and curator exploring the assertion of disability art as the last avant-garde. His methodology explores crip cultural practices as a means to resist normative idealities. Orienting towards a “crip horizon,” Sean’s practice explores the transformative possibilities of access aesthetics as an embodied politic that can desire the ways disability disrupts. Sean is currently the Director of Programming at Tangled Art + Disability. He holds a B.A. in Arts Management and Studio from UTSC. Sean is also an independent curator, lecturer, and advisor, adding his insights and perspectives to conversations across Canada, the US, and internationally. Sean serves on the board of the Toronto Arts Council and CARFAC Ontario, and is Chair of TAC’s Visual and Media Arts Committee.
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances, works for camera, installations, and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores, ancestral belongings, and art works. Her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Her Alutiiq/Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska. She lives in Nbisiing Anishnaabeg aki.
Abedar Kamgari is an artist, curator, and arts worker based in Hamilton and Toronto. In her practice, Abedar considers contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora. She is interested in body memory, complicated inheritances, border spaces, and the idea of distance. Abedar often engages performative, site-responsive, and participatory strategies to unpack the presence, absence, movements, and responsibilities of bodies in relation to land and labour. She holds a BFA (2016) and an MFA (2022) in interdisciplinary studio. Abedar has performed, screened, and exhibited her work in a range of institutions across Southern Ontario.
This project made possible through the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.
