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MAIN SPACE: Productive Discomfort curated by Lauren Cullen

Susan Blight, Heidi Cho, Kaythi, Seiji, Anne Rucchetto, Jessica Watkin, and James Yeboah

March 1-30, 2019

Productive Discomfort is a project and group exhibition encompassing seven hooked rugs, each conceptually designed and produced around the theme of ‘unwelcome mats’. Contributing artists, who predominantly work in non-rug hooking mediums, learned the technique through a series of collaborative workshop led by Toronto-based artist and facilitator Lauren Cullen.

Canadian hooked mats are often exhibited as domestic objects greeting guests with good cheer. Anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist queer crip perspectives remind us however that objects and spaces are never truly welcoming to all. While a hooked rug marks a threshold and communicates an expectation of serving, Productive Discomfort rubs up against this promise and explores what can happen when we draw attention to that which is unwelcome. Thus this exhibition invites the audience to consider the following question; how can unwelcome rugs and social aspects of rug hooking serve as a disruptive force?

Productive Discomfort is part of Myseum Intersections: Revisionist Toronto.

Documentation by Polina Teif

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Game Night with Golboo Amani

February 28, 2017

Our first game night facilitated by artist Golboo Amani invited participants to play, laugh, and connect while reflecting on how board games generate very specific platforms for familial and social bonding.

From the artist: It is my interest in pedagogical practices that led me to think about games as sites of peer-produced aesthetic experiences. One of the oldest leisure activities, designed to develop skills of strategy through social engagement, games are sites where social practice and pedagogy collide. Games are performative spaces that condition very particular skills like team building, developing strategies and assessing risk. Having found infinite ways to discipline ourselves through practice and rigor, games recognize competitive co-operative spaces as sites for social pedagogy and performance analysis. Game space is a virtual landscape that allows us to perform in ways we wouldn’t in real life. Often games require of us to take great risks, cut our losses and enhance our competitive drive with less at stake than real life. Many of the strategies employed within the field of knowledge production are related to games, which are effectively used as teaching aids and tools for conditioning field specific skills. As we become more and more proficient at the games we play we must ask ourselves, what narratives are we accepting by engaging with these games? What skills are we enhancing by playing the rules of the game?

This program accompanied the exhibition, Blood Ties, part of Myseum of Toronto Intersections 2017, an annual festival of exhibits exploring different perspectives on the city’s natural, cultural, and historical diversity.

All photos by Sarah Bodri