Tag: Site 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.

© 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
Golboo Amani
Cressida Kocienski
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 for situated perspectives on the possibilities of performance as a contextual spatial practice. The works situate artists and audience 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

Friday and Saturday in March @ 2:00pm–6:00pm
The School of Bartered Knowledge by Golboo Amani

March 8 @ 8:00pm
Planetaria by Cressida Kocienski

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

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

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

March 28 @ 7:00pm
Opening of the exhibition of sight.specific exhibition of residue/ephemera

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

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.