Tag: Enter-gration

After a 10-year hiatus, FADO’s emerging Artists Series is back in 2025!

A much-loved staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, FADO’s emerging Artists series was created to provide a platform for younger artists to develop and present a performance piece in a professional context, often for the first time. As the series developed, the opportunity it provided extended to nurturing new performance curators. Each new project in the series has interpreted in its own particular way the central term of its mandate reformulating who/what should be considered ‘emerging’ in the context of performance art practice as presented through the FADO frame.

For the 2025 Emerging Artist Series, ‘emerging’ is discarded as a label that reveals age, defines time spent or as a qualification of perceived depth of experience. Instead, from February through May two curators and three series researcher residents develop performance installations, performance events and research projects that bring the notion of ‘emerging’ into relationship with community and forms of practice.

2025: On View | curated by Jordan King
2025: not knowing is the most intimate | curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan
2025: EAS LABists: Christina Anna Trutiak, James Knott, Vanessa Godden
2014: 11:45 P.M. | curated by Kate Barry
2013: .sight specific. | curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
2011: Extra-Rational | curated by Gale Allen
2009: Misinformed Informants | curated by Lisa Visser
2008: Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas
2007: Enter-gration | curated by Nahed Mansour
2005: Open Airway | curated by Elle McLaughlin
2005: Feats, might | curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland
2004: Home Repair by One Night Only
2004: Game City | curated by Craig Leonard
2003: Gestures | curated by Tanya Mars

FADO’s Emerging Artists series was initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch and educator Tanya Mars, who recognized that the best way to encourage young artists was by offering them a professional presentation opportunity. Her vision was one of mentorship, targeting an interesting mix of new and emerging artists, many of them former students, whom she commissioned to develop new works responding to a thematic context. The first event, curated by Mars, included ambient, conceptual and cabaret-style performance art gestures. This event later developed into the Emerging Artists Series. FADO’s intention with this on-going series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship, and showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.

As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators, allowing FADO to encourage new curatorial voices in performance art, and introducing FADO to new communities of artists (and new artists to FADO). The series has continued to develop and change, later including the work of artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well. This way, the series exposes local audiences to the range of performance work happening in the emerging performance scene across Canada.

© Rita Camacho Lomeli, 2022. Deep in the Streets. Photo Henry Chan.

Mexico / Canada

Rita Camacho Lomeli is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Moving across visual art forms such as paintings, print works, performances, installations, and everyday events like walking and conversing, her work focuses on revealing the contemporary condition of objects and spaces. She has exhibited her work in artist-run centres, festivals, and on the streets.

Moving across visual art forms and everyday events such as walking and conversing, my work focuses on revealing the formal, the material and the contemporary condition of objects and spaces, making them visible and tangible in a different way. I create paintings, print works, performances and installations. One of my main concerns is to examine one of the most critical issues in traditional aesthetics, “the frame.”  I consider the frame an open process of interaction with the environment. Therefore, in my practice, I contest to what extent nondescript objects, quotidian events, and the randomness of the every day are part of the meaning of my work. Consequently, I am in the continuous exploration in which the boundaries of art and the environment are no longer clear, searching to create works that interrelate art and life.

Somalia / Canada

Idil Mussa is a Toronto based, Somali-Canadian artist. She is most fascinated with how social and political movements inspire people to action and the ways in which those movements shape art and culture.

Mexico / Canada

Jesus Mora was born in 1971 in Mexico. He has studied arts in Mexico, Canada and Italy and has participated in several art projects, exhibitions, workshops and festivals. Ancient iconography is an important factor in his artwork, expressed in paintings, photography, video, sculpture and performance.

Karilynn Ming Ho is an interdisciplinary artist. Her work aims to thoughtfully renegotiate the construction of gender and identity through performance, video and installation. Karilynn Ming Ho has exhibited at Images Festival (Toronto), The Western Front (Vancouver]) and Festival Nemo (Paris).

Canada
www.radiodress.ca

Reena Katz is an artist and musician, working with a variety of audio, performance and installation practices. Katz’s oeuvre explores her connection to migration, women’s labour, urban histories and anachronism. Her piece are we sleeping yet? looked at sleep surveillance technologies and obsession with national security.

Canada

Rachel Gorman has presented her performance work at the Winchester Street Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and Artword Theatre. Rachel has created several site-specific pieces, and is currently exploring mixed-race identity through dance on video. Rachel has been a member of the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists since 2001.

Canada

Tejpal S. Ajji is a Malton, Ontario-based artist whose ongoing investigations of the “invisible structures” of genetics, gravity, airborne disease, and government bureaucracy have led to an interest in social engineering processes. Development in government subsidized housing, immigration integration and colonial policy are explored from personal and broader cultural experience.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
https://bojanavidekanic.com/

Bojana Videkanic is an artist, curator and an art historian born in Bosnia and Herzegovina/former Yugoslavia. After becoming a stateless person, she came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee in 1995.

Videkanic is an Assistant Professor of contemporary art and visual culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, Ontario Canada. Her art historical research focuses on the 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms through Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement and various de-colonial cultural practices. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: socialist postcolonial practices in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2019. Videkanic has also written about contemporary artists coming from the region, most recently about Tanja Ostojić’s seven-year long project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić which deals with recent cultural and socio-economic histories of the post-Yugoslav region from a feminist perspective.

Her current research investigates memorial sites of the Non-Aligned Movement, in particular architecture and monuments built to commemorate each NAM summit. Her artistic practice is based mostly in performance art, but Videkanic also works in video, text and installation. Her work mines personal experiences of displacement, movement, and identity as these intersect with larger political, social and cultural questions. Her most recent work deals with the transformation of her native country into a lawless zone for the development of various neo-liberal capitalist projects and new forms of colonization.

Videkanic is a board member of 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival in Toronto, and sat on boards of galleries and artist-run centres. She has presented her work nationally and internationally at performance festivals such as Nuit Blanche Toronto, 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival Toronto, MS:T International Festival from Calgary, Hemispherica, Montreal, IPA Platform and Workshop, Bristol, IMAFestival, Serbia. 

FADO in cooperation with Toronto Free Gallery, is pleased to announce the latest instalment of its ongoing Emerging Artists series. In Enter-gration, curated by Nahed Mansour, a roster of local performance artists explore immigration issues.

ARTISTS
Bojana Videkanic
Idil Mussa
Jesus Mora
Karilynn Ming Ho
Rachel Gorman
Reena Katz
Rita Camacho Lomeli
Tejpal S. Ajji

North America is increasingly joining global debates on immigration as new racisms surface. Borders and boundaries are being redefined in the name of security, as movement is facilitated for some groups while others are excluded. The question is who benefits from this security regime? Who is left out? This event is a small step to building our collective awareness of the demands of movement, expectations of submission, and the struggle to fulfill challenges faced by millions with precarious status daily.

Curator Nahed Mansour writes:

Crossing the border into North American society is not a simple act for immigrants and refugees. [“It should be hard! We need safety! How else are we going to know who’s coming into our country?”] In curating Enter-gration, I’m trying to break down these well-worn myths. [“Why?”] I intend to explore ways in which integration through assimilation is a tactic aimed to make visible minorities invisible. [“But we have multiculturalism, don’t we?”].

PROGRAM

March 1, 7:00pm
Crossing Borders/Crossing Bodies by Bojana Videkanic
Illegal Migration by Jesus Mora

March 2, 7:00pm
Transit by Rachel Gorman
Suhbuhk [Lesson] by Tejpal S. Ajji

March 3, 4:00pm
Knot by Idil Mussa
Crossing Borders/Crossing Bodies by Bojana Videkanic
Order to Remedy by Reena Katz

March 4, 2:00pm
Urban Meditations by Rita Camacho Lomeli
Cowboy BeBop (Ode To My Daddy) by Karilynn Ming Ho
Illegal Migration by Jesus Mora