Tag: Sight Specific

Guatemala/Canada
https://francisco-fernando-granados.blogspot.com/

Francisco-Fernando Granados (he/him) was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities in unceded Coast Salish territories. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions. His exhibition ‘who claims abstraction?’ is on view at Simon Fraser University Galleries in Vancouver throughout 2023. Recent projects include ‘refugee reconnaissance,’ a bilingual compilation of performance scores spanning 2005-2013 presented by AXENÉO7 in 2021.

© Maryam Taghavi, Variations on Absurdity, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

Iran / Canada
www.maryamtaghavidotcom.wordpress.com

Born and raised in Iran, Maryam Taghavi is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work includes drawing, photography, site-specific installation, and performance. Her practice is spread across social and spatial paradigms (the artist has been traveling between Iran and Canada since her graduation), and investigates the enigmatic relations between then and now, self and other, fiction and non-fiction. Examining the corporeal and psychological exchanges between architecture, domestic objects and the human body, she creates different scenarios for contemplation and forms of reception. She has participated in a number of exhibitions in Canada, Mexico and Iran.

“Fascinated by fleeting realms in social and spatial paradigms, my practice investigates enigmatic realtions between then and now, self and other, and fiction and non-fiction. I examine corporeal and psychological exchange in relation to architectural sites, domestic objects and human body to create a different scenario for contemplation and forms of reception.”

© Cressida Kocienski, Planetaria, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

UK
www.cressidakocienski.blogspot.ca

Cressida Kocienski holds an MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, London. Working between video, performance, and text, her research concerns spatial production and modes of narration. She collaborates with architects Nishat Awan and Phil Langley as OPENkhana, with Suzanne Harris-Brandts as O[S]R, and is co-editor of experimental publishing platform The Institute of Immaterialism. Kocienski was filmmaker in residence with Decolonizing Architecture Artists Residency, West Bank (2011).

She has worked collaboratively within Art on the Underground; James Taylor Gallery; South London Gallery; ICA, and Resonance FM. Her films have been screened at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2010); FormContent, London (2010); Pleasure Dome and TSV, Toronto (2012). She has performed at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010) and Tenderpixel, London (2012).

© Basil AlZeri, T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

Palestine / Canada
https://basilalzeri.com/

Basil AlZeri is an interdisciplinary, Toronto-based Palestinian artist working in performance, video, installation, food, and public art interventions/projects. His work is grounded in his practice as an art educator and community worker.  He is engaged with the intersection of everyday actions and life necessities with art. Given the context of a space, his work strives to interact with the public through gestures of generosity in social interactions and exchanges. AlZeri’s performance work has been exhibited in Toronto (Nuit Blanche, Whipper Snapper Gallery), Quebec (Fait Maison 14), Winnipeg (Central Canadian Centre for Performance), and Mexico (Transmuted International Performance Art Festival, Performancear O Morir). Upcoming projects include a public performance project with the Ottawa Art Gallery/Creative Cities Conference, and performances in Chile And Argentina in 2013.

© Golboo Amani, Legs Too, 2015. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada
https://golbooamani.com/

Golboo Amani is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist, who creates works focused on process and research through a variety of mediums including photography, performance, space intervention, digital media, and participatory practice. She received her BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Concerned with the configurations of power imbedded within institutional structures of knowledge production, Golboo’s practice centers on pedagogical practices and artist-run counter culture. Through cross-disciplinary collaborative projects, the artist’s recent bodies of work involve facilitating inclusive spaces of agency, organizing sites for generous skill sharing and embodied acts of reclamation.

ARTISTS
Basil AlZeri
Cressida Kocienski
Golboo Amani
Maryam Taghavi

.sight.specific. proposes performance art as the staging of sight as site: observation as contour, terrain, and architecture for modes of aesthetic embodiment. The project consists of four commissioned live works in search of situated perspectives on the possibilities of performance as a contextual spatial practice. The works situate artists and audiences by trading knowledge on the streets, tracing trans-planetary sight lines, creating home and hospitality in real time through cyberspace, and staging variations on absurdity. The shapes of these relationships brings into focus questions of knowledge and memory, contact and distance, longing and belonging.

.site.specific is co-presented with Xpace Cultural Centre

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: The School of Bartered Knowledge by Golboo Amani
Fridays and Saturdays in March 2013 @ 2:00pm–6:00pm

Performance: Planetaria by Cressida Kocienski
March 8, 2013 @ 8:00pm

Performance: T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad by Basil AlZeri
March 15, 2013 @ 8:00pm
Co-presented by FUSE Magazine and Israeli Apartheid Week Toronto

Workshop: T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad by Basil AlZeri
March 16 & 17, 2013 @ 1:00pm

Performance: Variations on Absurdity by Maryam Taghavi
March 22, 2013 @ 8:00pm

Exhibition opening: .sight.specific. residue/ephemera
March 28, 2013 @ 7:00pm

Panel Discussion: Viewing .sight.specific.
With Basil AlZeri, Golboo Amani, Cressida Kocienski, Maryam Taghavi, and moderators Johanna Householder and Francisco-Fernando Granados
March 30, 2013 @ 2:00pm

Initiated in 2003 by Tanya Mars, FADO’s Emerging Artists series was created to provide a professional platform for emerging artists to develop and present a performance piece, working within a curatorial framework. FADO’s intention with this 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.

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 FADO’s on-going Emerging Artists series which was designed to highlighting the work of Toronto-based emerging performance artists.

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.

The Emerging Artists series was a staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, and was always one of the most popular events in FADO’s performance art calendar.

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

In 2024 and 2025, the Emerging Artist series returns! Stay tuned for details.