{"id":22695,"date":"2022-05-31T09:00:46","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T16:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=22695"},"modified":"2022-06-01T10:02:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-01T17:02:00","slug":"queer-futurities-art-exhibit-uses-polyvocality-to-get-messages-across","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2022\/05\/31\/queer-futurities-art-exhibit-uses-polyvocality-to-get-messages-across\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Futurities<\/em> art exhibit uses polyvocality to get messages across"},"content":{"rendered":"

Queer Futurities: holding area, gathering place<\/i> is a new exhibit at Open Space that highlights sociological ideas such as queer futurity and forward-dawning as a way of combating fixtures in our hegemonic society. It achieves this through multidisciplinary art pieces created by 11 artists and curated by Dani Neira.<\/p>\n

The first spark for Queer Futurities<\/i> caught when Neira read queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Munoz\u2019s novel Cruising Utopia<\/i>, which explains that queer issues and news revolve too heavily around current topics.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Florence Yee’s Please Help Yourself<\/em>, a collaboration with Arezu Salamzadeh (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe book considers queerness as something that is future bound,\u201d says Neira. \u201cHe\u2019s looking at how queerness exists as this kind of ideology, something that\u2019s on the horizon, and he enacts this queer temporality where he looks at the past, present, and the future, and looks at how we can glimpse these futurities in the present. But they only exist as these glimmers of a forward-dawning queerness.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of forward-dawning was a powerful image to Neira, whose exhibit started to take form from there. She made an open call for artists but asked for artistic practices and conversations rather than art.<\/p>\n

\u201cI delineated my concepts, and the different scenes I was thinking through, and I asked for submissions, not of artwork but artistic practices… And then the actual artwork came after conversations,\u201d she says. \u201cSome of them are new works created for the show, and some of them are pre-existing work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neira was also inspired by the science-fiction works of Octavia Butler, specifically Parable of the Sower<\/i>. Butler\u2019s book made Neira think about the two questions that became the skeleton for Queer Futurities<\/i>: how do we want to hold and be held? What do we want our communities to feel like?<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the pandemic, I got really into sci-fi and, specifically, speculative fiction, so I was reading Parable of the Sower<\/i>… Throughout Butler\u2019s books, there\u2019s this necessity for networks of care and interdependence… And so those two questions came about from that type of query.\u201d<\/p>\n

Polyvocality\u2014the use of different voices and perspectives\u2014was crucial to answering these two questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to allow for multiple entry points and discourses,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd so, by centring polyvocality, this project doesn\u2019t aim to speak to, like, every queer experience. I\u2019m more thinking about polyvocality as extending beyond the artist and into all of their queer relationalities, and how that extends into all of our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibit is divided into the holding area and the gathering place. However, Neira says that they are interdependent upon one another and the exhibit\u2019s overall message.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpecifically for the exhibition holding area,\u201d she says, \u201cwhen thinking about holding, I was thinking a lot about the tenderness and affect in holding.\u201d<\/p>\n

After starting in the holding area, visitors will drift into the gathering place, where Neira says the focus is on community building and coming together.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to centre the importance of community building, gathering, and multiple levels of access in the project,\u201d she says, \u201cand so rather than the community program part of gathering place… I wanted to centre that and wanted to give it its own part and its own artist, so it\u2019s not just secondary to the exhibition itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neira wants Queer Futurities<\/i> to be the start of a dialogue surrounding queer topics and a way to build relationships.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the queer community, I hope that the project either builds or nourishes relationships,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd as an extension of those relationships, the care and knowledge that comes from those relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Queer Futurities: holding area, gathering place
\n<\/i>Until Saturday, July 23
\nOpen Space
\nopenspace.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Queer Futurities: holding area, gathering place is a new exhibit at Open Space that highlights sociological ideas such as queer futurity and forward-dawning as a way of combating fixtures in our hegemonic society. It achieves this through multidisciplinary art pieces created by 11 artists and curated by Dani Neira. The first spark for Queer Futurities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22696,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22695"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22739,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22695\/revisions\/22739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}