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Reflections on Transparency
Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
TPW is delighted to present a new commission by Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel.
Reflections on Transparency is an examination of the transparent barriers that have become ubiquitous in sites of retail in light of COVID-19. Born of an interest in hostile architecture, public space and landscapes that elicit particular behaviours, this investigation meditates on the intersections between the politics of hygiene and disaster capitalism.
Benjamin and Sophia’s project will be posted on TPW’s Instagram from October 8 – 10, 2020.
Biographies
Benjamin de Boer (b. 1995, Attawandaron, ON) is a writer, researcher, and bookseller living in Tkaronto. They received their Honours BA in Philosophy and Archaeology from the University of Toronto in 2018. Benjamin can be found studying the melancholy poetics of our earth lyric and exploring their openness to improvisation within a practice of group enunciation. Favouring sympedagogic situations, Benjamin currently co-directs Hearth, an arts space founded alongside Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Leonard Ocampo.
Sophia Oppel (b. 1995) is an arts practitioner and researcher born and based in Tkaronto. Oppel’s work examines interfaces and infrastructures as sites of power, and their influences on embodied experience. Oppel received her BFA from OCAD University and is currently a co-director of Bunker 2 Gallery, and a Master of Visual Studies candidate at the University of Toronto. Oppel has exhibited locally and internationally.
Reflections on Transparency is presented in the context of MOVEMENTS. As its title suggests, this online and site-specific program presents several projects by artists whose work references diverse definitions, experiences and enactments of movements. Bringing together a range of practices, MOVEMENTS reflects on both the intimate scale of the body as it shifts through time and space, within transient gestures and encounters, and organized actions that provoke vital, unsettling change.
MOVEMENTS is made possible with support from Partners in Art
Image Credit
Photographs from Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
Reflections on Transparency
Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
TPW is delighted to present a new commission by Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel.
Reflections on Transparency is an examination of the transparent barriers that have become ubiquitous in sites of retail in light of COVID-19. Born of an interest in hostile architecture, public space and landscapes that elicit particular behaviours, this investigation meditates on the intersections between the politics of hygiene and disaster capitalism.
Benjamin and Sophia’s project will be posted on TPW’s Instagram from October 8 – 10, 2020.
Biographies
Benjamin de Boer (b. 1995, Attawandaron, ON) is a writer, researcher, and bookseller living in Tkaronto. They received their Honours BA in Philosophy and Archaeology from the University of Toronto in 2018. Benjamin can be found studying the melancholy poetics of our earth lyric and exploring their openness to improvisation within a practice of group enunciation. Favouring sympedagogic situations, Benjamin currently co-directs Hearth, an arts space founded alongside Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Leonard Ocampo.
Sophia Oppel (b. 1995) is an arts practitioner and researcher born and based in Tkaronto. Oppel’s work examines interfaces and infrastructures as sites of power, and their influences on embodied experience. Oppel received her BFA from OCAD University and is currently a co-director of Bunker 2 Gallery, and a Master of Visual Studies candidate at the University of Toronto. Oppel has exhibited locally and internationally.
Reflections on Transparency is presented in the context of MOVEMENTS. As its title suggests, this online and site-specific program presents several projects by artists whose work references diverse definitions, experiences and enactments of movements. Bringing together a range of practices, MOVEMENTS reflects on both the intimate scale of the body as it shifts through time and space, within transient gestures and encounters, and organized actions that provoke vital, unsettling change.
MOVEMENTS is made possible with support from Partners in Art
Image Credit
Photographs from Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
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Gallery TPW acknowledges that we live, work and create on stolen land. We occupy the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original custodians of this land. Tkaronto is part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon covenant, which reminds us that we all share the same bowl and spoon, therefore we must take only what we need to allow for continued abundance and future viability.[1]
Jas M. Morgan’s August 2020 report entitled A Culture of Exploitation: “Reconciliation” and the Institutions of Canadian Art [2] reminds us that Canadian art industries are implicated in colonial violence, and that we have a history of erasure and exploitation of Indigenous cultural workers. Gallery TPW is committed to reconciliation, inclusivity, social justice and reciprocity in the physical and virtual spaces that we occupy. We are actively working towards best practices, where long-term relationships are met with mentorship, support and care.
We have also been thinking about the inequitable distribution of resources across so-called Canada, both within the arts and far beyond it. The Canadian government committed to eliminating all long-term drinking water advisories on Indigenous reserves by March 2021. However, there are still over 58 long-term drinking water advisories currently in place on Indigenous reserves in Canada. Many of these have been in effect for over a decade, and a vast majority of them are in Ontario.[3] Two of these communities include the Mississaugas of the Scugog Island First Nation and the Chippewa of Georgina Island, both are less than a two hour drive from Gallery TPW. It is reprehensible that in 2021 as one of the wealthiest countries that controls about 20% of the world’s freshwater supply, Indigenous people in Canada are left without access to clean and safe water in their homes, because the government and big business actively disregard the communities recognized in Canada’s constitution and in historic and contemporary Treaties.[4]
Gallery TPW acknowledges the sovereignty of First Nations peoples and supports the 1492 Land Back Lane Land Defenders, and their allies, who are fighting to reclaim unceded Haudenosaunee land while also resisting acts of violence by the Ontario Provincial Police. In our solidarity letter,[5] we urge Canadian officials, at all levels, to recognize the 1784 Haldimand Proclamation and the Six Nations Confederacy’s rights and entitlements over this land. As a public art institution who represents hundreds of stakeholders across the province and that sits on traditional Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Wendat territories, we denounce the unjust process of land development that has occurred within the Haldimand Tract.
Acknowledging the land is an important first step towards unlearning our complicity in settler colonization. However, much more needs to be done by settlers, by our government, and by us as arts practitioners to educate ourselves and others, and to endeavor to end ongoing colonial violence.
The staff of Gallery TPW are working together to better understand and acknowledge our implication in settler-imperial violence through reading groups and discussions. We are asking ourselves: how can this learning be applied to our programming and structure as an artist-run-centre? Below is a list of essays we have read and discussed that we would like to share with our community. We will be updating this acknowledgement to reflect our thinking, reading, and current conditions.
–Gallery TPW staff, April 21, 2021
Questions and comments are welcome: info (@) gallerytpw.ca
Readings
A Culture of Exploitation: “Reconciliation” and the Institutions of Canadian Art
by Jas M. Morgan (formerly Lindsay Nixon)
Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor
By Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
Arts Funding, The State And Canadian Nation Making
Andrea Fatona
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dish_With_One_Spoon, accessed February 6, 2021
[2] https://yellowheadinstitute.org/a-culture-of-exploitation-reconciliation-and-the-institutions-of-canadian-art/, accessed February 6, 2021
[3] https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1506514143353/1533317130660, accessed February 6, 2021
[4] https://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/issues/indigenous-peoples/indigenous-peoples-in-canada, accessed February 6, 2021
[5] Reference to: TPW - Solidarity Letter with 1492 Land Back Lane Land Defenders