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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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Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?
Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser
Curated by Heather Canlas Rigg
September 9 - November 5, 2022
Opening reception: Thursday, September 8, 6-8pm, artist walkthrough at 6:30pm
Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? brings us into near and distant futures, where internet, gaming and camera technologies have been re-routed to create a spiritual guide steeped in matrilineal knowledge. The exhibition is one part speculative documentary, and one part Virtual Reality. Together they tell the story of Piña, a babaylan–Filipino shaman–of sorts, who lives in the future and whose consciousness is formed through modes of transmission akin to Artificial Intelligence systems. Messengers from various realms and places around the world use digitally altered pineapple fabric to upload their dreams, desires, and inherited knowledge to Piña, who exists to receive, care for, and disseminate the shared information for its continued preservation.
The documentary is rooted in Ecuador and the Philippines, two places where the effects of Spanish colonization continue, and where the artists have familial ties. Throughout the video we meet three sets of messengers–Kankwana Canelos and Rupay Gualinga, Janet Dolera and Alba Pavon–who share insights into their lives. In doing so, they point to the ongoing challenges faced by the conquistador’s violent erasure and oppression of Indigenous communities and ways of life. The artists ask: how can familial, pre-colonial knowledge survive into the present and future?
Viewers intimately enter Piña’s realm in the VR component of the exhibition, watching as the deity carries out everyday activities and as they locate and receive the digital weavings sent to them. They swipe through, download and process the material. The fabric acts as sustenance for Piña, and connects their realm with messengers in other futures and worlds, including our own through the inclusion of the textiles within the exhibition. Through the imagining of Piña, Comilang and Speiser consider how embodied, pre-colonial knowledge can survive through the use of an empathetic spiritual and digital vessel that can hold, back up, and share our mother’s, and our mother’s mother’s experiences, in this life and the next.
Biographies
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another—ranging from writing, sculpture, and printing to video and VR installations—Speiser’s work expands the possibilities between art and science fiction. He has exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, MMK Frankfurt, CAC Quito, Oracle Berlin, Croy Nielsen, MMCA Seoul, and Robert Grunenberg Berlin, among others.
