March 27-28, 2026
Gallery TPW
Gallery TPW is excited to announce the 2 day symposium:
_CODA: To Embrace the Break_
In partnership with Gallery Gachet (Vancouver), _CODA_ will present discourse, performance and workshops to reflect on the tenets presented in ___a lineage of transgression___. What happens when we embrace fracture, discordance and friction as fertile sites for creative action? Aligned with elements of Gallery Gachet’s exhibition Act 3: As Visible As Blood, these projects and this program foregrounds the fugitive histories and traditions of Black feminist writers and the transference to the visual, underscored through Black femme bodies.
Learn more about the exhibitions below:
Schedule
Friday, March 27, 2026 | 12PM-1:30PM
Curatorial Conversation: Traversing the (In)visible and (Il)legible: Curatorial and Publishing Practices
Liz Ikiriko, Olumoroti Soji-George, Afi Venessa Appiah
This public conversation brings together curator Olumoroti Soji-George (Gallery Gachet), writer and publisher Afi Venessa Appiah (afi press), and curator Liz Ikiriko (Gallery TPW) to consider the shared conceptual terrain between the exhibitions ACT 3: As Visible As Blood and ___a lineage of transgression___.
Working across exhibition-making, literary practice, and critical publishing, the speakers reflect on how Black feminist thought, language, and visual culture function as sites through which Black and Black femme subjectivities are continually encoded, obscured, translated, and rearticulated. George’s ACT 3: As Visible As Blood draws upon Saidiya Hartman’s speculative historiography to revisit the enduring figure of the Black Venus and the persistent afterlives of colonial visual regimes that render Black womanhood simultaneously hyper-visible and illegible. In dialogue, Ikiriko’s ___a lineage of transgression___ examines how Black feminist literary traditions (from Gwendolyn Brooks to Octavia Butler) circulate beyond the page, informing contemporary artistic practices that mobilize language as material, gesture, and spatial proposition.
Extending these curatorial investigations into the field of moving images and publishing, Afi Venessa Appiah’s ongoing research and publishing project Emblematic Elusions revisits early postcolonial African cinema to propose a critical reframing of how Black femme sexuality, agency, and desire emerge within films produced by Africans for African audiences. Through this work, Appiah offers new readings of the Black femme figure within the cinematic frame, attending to the ways erotic representation, spectatorship, and narrative positioning articulate alternative registers of subjectivity beyond colonial interpretive logics.
Together, the speakers consider how curatorial and publishing practices operate as modes of critical mediation, decoding, translating, and reiterating Black feminist knowledge across visual, literary, and cinematic forms.
Friday, March 27, 2026 | 2PM-4PM
Spatial Disruptions
A Conversation with Dr. Ola Mohammed and
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Join ___ a lineage of transgression___ artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed as she discusses her work and influences with Dr. Ola Mohammed, Assistant Professor and Tier II Research Chair , Black Sonic Cultures at York University, where she teaches Black Studies, Popular Culture, and Sound Studies courses. Together their work as creative teachers and learners offers considerations of spatial (physical, visual and sonic) disruptions for emancipatory survival.
Friday, March 27, 2026 | 7PM-8:30PM
Film Screening
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024)
with introduction by Olumoroti Soji-George
Join us for a screening of The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.
Inspired by the life and writings of Martinican writer and anti-colonial thinker Suzanne Césaire, the film unfolds less as a conventional biography and more as a poetic meditation on language, memory, and the unfinished project of Black intellectual and artistic life. Moving between staged performance, archival gesture, and speculative reflection, Hunt-Ehrlich approaches Césaire’s legacy as fragmentary, elusive, and continually re-interpreted.
Part literary homage and part cinematic essay, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire situates Césaire within a broader lineage of Black feminist writers and thinkers whose work has shaped how language, refusal, and imagination circulate across diasporic intellectual traditions. In doing so, the film echoes the concerns of a lineage of transgression, where language itself becomes material,moving off the page and into image, performance, and embodied form.
Saturday, March 28, 2026 | 11AM-1PM
On Visualizing Black Women's Labour
Panel Discussion + Book Launch with Qiana Mestrich and Chiedza Pasipanodya
Join NY-based artist, writer and photo historian Qiana Mestrich along with ___a lineage of transgression___ artist Chiedza Pasipanodya as they draw on their own research and practices to discuss the underrecognized and often exploited labour (physical, intellectual and otherwise) practices of Black women.
Join us after for a book signing with Qiana Mestrich to celebrate the launch of Decolonization and Diversity in Contemporary Photography: The Dodge & Burn Interviews published with Routledge.
Saturday, March 28, 2026 | 1PM-3PM
Exhibition Walkthrough
with nourbeSe Philip and Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Join us for an exhibition walkthrough of ___a lineage of transgression___ led by TPW Curator Liz Ikiriko, along with a poetry reading by nourbeSe Philip and annotation performance with Kameelah Janan Rasheed.
No registration required.
Artist Bios
Afi Venessa Appiah
I am a 30 year-old theorist who can remember being a 10-year old writer in my room in Montréal and who expects to someday be an 80-year old writer. I’m also comfortably reclusive – a hermit butterfly in the middle of New York – a latent sojourner, a reluctant cynic when I’m not careful, a questioning feminist, a Black African; an oil-and-water combination of zeal, lull, insecurity, certainty, and intensity.
Words inspired by the breath of Octavia Butler
Olumoroti Soji-George
Olumoroti (Moroti) Soji-George (he/they) is a curator, writer, film theorist, and educator based in Vancouver, BC. They are the Director/Curator of Gallery Gachet (Vancouver) and a founding member and former Co-Director/Curator of the Black Arts Centre (Surrey).Moroti’s curatorial practice centres Blackness as a critical framework rather than a fixed identity category, while working with artists across disciplines and communities. Their work engages contemporary photography as a key site of inquiry; particularly where image-making intersects with desire, labour, memory, intimacy, and power.Across exhibitions and public programs, Moroti is committed to community-centred, accessible art spaces that challenge dominant institutional logics and Western art-historical norms. Their practice foregrounds spatial politics, risk, and embodiment, with sustained attention to how visual culture can articulate alternative futures and affirm forms of life historically rendered invisible or expendable.
Qiana Mestrich
Qiana Mestrich (b. 1977, NYC) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and photo historian. Her autobiographical practice explores the complexities of Black and mixed-race identity, motherhood, and women’s corporate labor. A first-generation American of Panamanian and Croatian descent, Mestrich’s photography and collage have been exhibited internationally, including at Vassar College and The National Museum of Computing (UK).
In 2007, Mestrich founded Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History, with a companion book of photographer interviews and essays published by Routledge in 2025. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from ICP-Bard College. Her recent honors include the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories grant, the 2025 CPW Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer, and the 2025 VMFA Aaron Siskind Award. Mestrich lives and works between Brooklyn and New York’s Hudson Valley.
Chiedza Pasipanodya
Chiedza Pasipanodya is a Zimbabwean-Canadian sculptor, writer and curator who investigates material logic and temporality, and challenges notions of subjectivity through a post-minimalist lens. Drawing from African diasporic aesthetics and metaphysical inquiry, they create sculptures and installations, explore how objects are vessels for lived histories, perceptual shifts, and cultural transmission, and invite audiences to reconsider the meanings of objects, materials and sites. Pasipanodya’s notable exhibitions and installations include Dura | a mechanism for recalling sensibilities of community care, Fort York Historic Site, BAND Gallery, Toronto, CA (2024); Ndafunga Dande (Thoughts of Home), Art Gallery of Burlington, Burlington, CA (2023); Control, Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, Bucharest, RO (2024); New Forms: that which constitutes (critical) matter, Artspeak, Vancouver, CA (2023), and Genealogies of Sustenance, The Gardiner Museum, Toronto, CA (2024).
They are the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, including the Cranbrook Art Museum, Purchase Award (2025). Pasipanodya received their MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Arts and BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University, where they researched Black Canadian artistic lineages and long-term cultural engagement. They have participated in artist residencies at the Watershed Centre for Ceramic Arts (USA), Dzimbanhete Arts and Cultural Interactions (Zimbabwe),and the Global Experience Project: Maria Thereza Alves (Italy).
Kiera Boult
Kiera Boult is a Hamilton-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and cultural worker. Her practice uses camp and comedy to question the role and identity of the artist and the institution. Through her iconic persona, Kiki, a self-described “guilt-free” celebrity, Boult offers sharp critiques from the perspective of a celebrated Black biracial icon navigating white institutions with ease. She is an MFA candidate at Western University and a member of the Toronto Performance Art Collective, which organizes the biannual international performance festival 7a*11d.
Liz Ikiriko
Liz Ikiriko is a Tkaronto/Toronto–based artist and curator whose practice is informed by her experiences as a mixed Nigerian Canadian, prairie-raised daughter and mother. Her work engages questions of power, systems of oppression, and the social conditions that shape how we see, relate, and belong. She is the co-founder, with Toleen Touq, of wave~form~projects, a collective dedicated to intimate and relational curatorial practice and is the curator and head of programming at Gallery TPW.
Ola Mohammed
Dr. Ola Mohammed is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Black Canadian Studies Certificate in the Department of Humanities at York University, where she teaches Black Studies, Popular Culture, and Sound Studies courses. She was recently awarded the York Research Chair Tier II in Black Sonic Cultures that generates a series of projects that advance innovative interdisciplinary analysis of Black Cultural practices, the impacts of urban change, and what produces a livable city to highlight both the constraints of anti-Black racism and the ways Black people disrupt dominant spatial forms. Her research interests include Black Studies, Popular Music and Sound Studies, Performance Theory and Diaspora Studies. Her forthcoming publications include “Cringy Sounds, Pleasurable Acts: The Difficulty of Articulating Antiblackness in Canada” in the Power of Listening collection celebrating the 15th anniversary of Sounding Out! Sound Studies blog by NYU Press as well as an entry on “Sound” in the Thinking from Black: A Lexicon by Alchemy by Knopf Canada. Her manuscript, The Black Nowhere: Sonic Architectures of Dispossession, examines the often- overlooked auditory dimension of anti-Blackness in Canada. The work examines how sound is shaped by political ontologies of race and the epistemological stakes of critical listening practices in the face of quotidian and spectacular anti-Black violence.
nourbeSe Philip
nourbeSe philip is an unembedded poet without ambition who was born in Tobago and lives in the space time of Toronto whose cool green ravines continue to delight and calm her. Author of several works of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, she remains humbled by the risk-based act of faith that is the practice of poetry.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/her) explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; learning environments and other forms yet to be determined. She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences. She is currently based in NYC.