Creative Conciliations: Its Roots and its Innovative Departures: Considering Curatorial Hospitality

Its Roots and its Innovative Departures: Considering Curatorial Hospitality

Figure 1. Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures, Research Mapping, April 2019. Photo: Toby Lawrence.

by Toby Katrine Lawrence

“How can thinking of the curatorial in terms of hospitality be used to critically analyze the parameters of curatorial practice, and thus lend insight into its socio-political relevance in particular?” – Beatrice Von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer (2016, 9)

Hospitality weaves through the experiential and physical elements of an exhibition. It is present in the ways in which relationships are nurtured, and in how visitors, contributors, and knowledges are cared for through the support and facilities provided by organizations and organizers. Considered in the context of curation, relational complexities flow between guest and host, and the Indigenous territories in which exchange occurs, particularly in North America where this inquiry is rooted. For Maurice Hamington (2010), “hospitality operates at the border of membership, but it is precisely at the border where learning takes place—learning about self and Others through confronting difference. Expanding the notion of guest inclusion unlocks the epistemic power of hospitality” (28). Most mainstream art museums and art schools across North America have been established through settler-colonial models and are inevitably in operation as uninvited guests on Indigenous lands. Acknowledgements of territory and the notion of the ‘uninvited’ invoke the language of hospitality, yet are often met with obfuscations of the dual responsibilities of such invocation. Cautioned by Maja Ćirić (2016), there is a risk that adopting a discourse of hospitality within the curatorial may do little more than perpetuate existing art world hierarchies through a new thematic. In this form, there is no redistribution of power, rather, as Ćirić observes, “hospitality has been abused in a way that stimulates the spectacle of differences in order to prevent the institution of art from achieving any real change” (208-209).

Considering the labour of arts workers in tandem with communities that build and guide Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, and with Ćirić’s observations in mind, the concept of hospitality necessitates a sincere look at who is represented in mainstream art spaces, as well as the limitations of representation and how truth-telling and conciliatory methods—the ongoing transformative processes from hostility to hospitality—are addressed within the spaces of the curatorial.[1] Highlighting power dynamics and protocols, such an inquiry asks whose social contracts form the foundation of these relationships and transformations? With this Creative Conciliations volume and the shifting language that shapes it—reconciliation to conciliation—the question reaches further to reveal how we visit is coupled with how relationships are cultivated and sustained. Reflecting on a performance for an official event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Tahltan artist, curator, and educator Peter Morin (2016) offers the following:

Reconciliation begins with an acknowledgement of difficult political history. This is not an easy task. It requires vigilance, vigilance against the silencing of Indigenous voices. It requires self-awareness. The difficult task is finding actions to activate this space where Indigenous knowledge meets settler ways of being. They are bodies of knowledge that mingle and impact each other. And often their meeting requires yet another meeting. (70-71)

At the “border of membership” (28), as put by Hamington, considering curatorial hospitality as an intermediary space where, as articulated by Morin, “Indigenous knowledge meets settler ways of being” (71), puts pressure on the mechanisms of curatorial practice to address the foundations of the relationships that sit at the root of each project and to establish grounding for coming together in our differences; in support and (re)conciliation.

As an experiential way to come together in difference, I undertook a Project Room Studio creative residency in April 2019 at the Comox Valley Art Gallery in Courtenay, BC. Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures (fig.1) set out to engage the relationality of knowledge (referencing Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson) through visiting, sharing food, scholarship review, and by making space in a public art gallery for conversation and reflection around ideas of curatorial hospitality. Discussants found their way into the space through invitation and happenstance. Given the small scope of the residency and budget, I extended invitations to practitioners in my local network and with whom the development of these ideas began—Michelle Jacques, then chief curator at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, now chief curator at Remai Modern in Saskatoon; Angela Somerset, curator at Comox Valley Art Gallery (CVAG); and artist and educator Jennifer Van de Pol. Troy Moth and Celine Trojand of Art Tahsis were invited to participate in conversation and in a corresponding gathering on compassionate practice hosted by the CVAG curators. Additional artists and curators were invited to join me as discussants, but were unavailable during the residency period. Phone conversations during the residency and subsequent meetings with my collaborators, Krista Arias and Lindsay Harris, have also been instrumental in developing this ongoing research.

Figure 2. Cempasuchil (Bread, Flesh & Ink), digital photograph, 2018. Photo: Toby Lawrence.

My investigations around curatorial hospitality initially began as part of my interdisciplinary collaborations with Krista and Lindsay, and our ongoing activities under the auspices of Bread, Flesh & Ink (fig.2).[2] Our collaborations are centred around hosting formal and informal gatherings—activist potlucks—exploring the inherent vulnerability of a potluck and as a place to ask questions such as: What do we bring of ourselves and our ancestors when we gather? What are the shapes of hospitality in the body? How are multi-directional guest-host relations supported? Provoked, first, by a simple need for clarification in conversation with my collaborators (What is curatorial hospitality?), many discussions followed with a number colleagues around aspects of this question. This research also builds on and is indebted to decades of anti-racist and decolonial work in the arts. Acknowledging, as well, that exhibitions and galleries continue to operate through the “assumption that there is a certain kind of stability in who the decision makers are, in who the curators are, who the experts are and who the audiences are” (Blodgett 2002, 213), as stated by Richard Fung nearly 40 years ago. Challenging the assumption of stability and the whiteness that defines it, redefinition of what occurs and is normalized in the exhibition space is a matter of ongoing testing through action (Hogue 2018, 14).

The publicness of this project was an ever-important component of this work. As reflections and critique of society, art spaces operate as “a symbolic playing field” wherein convention can be arrested and permission is granted for social, political, and environmental inquiry and alternative strategies to be exercised (Locher 2016, 66). I found that the occurrence of Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures occasioned precedent for deep thinking through visitation and conversation within the public facing spaces of the art gallery. The title speaks to ‘radicality’ as both the root or fundamental nature of something, or as the progressive independence of, or departure from, what is usual or traditional, and, finally, as a concluding line from an exhibition proposal (Words to speak more often) I have yet to realize. In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality, a later project with Open Space in Victoria, BC, running throughout 2020 into 2021, enabled me to take this inquiry further and set theory into action. This time working with the programming committee, I began to better understand my responsibilities as a guest of the artist-run-centre to include showing up where I was needed. This meant facilitating the program mandate revisioning process, and working in collaboration to identify default practices and to establish organizational points of action as Open Space continued its process of decolonizing its programs and administrative practices.

In the second week of the residency at CVAG, it became clear that this research would not be about defining the rules of curatorial hospitality. Rather, the residency offered space for establishing a foundation from which to build, and veins of inquiry to attend to with greater specificity through ongoing research and practice. The augmented journal entries included in this chapter are a brief representation of numerous hours of dialogue and research that took place throughout April 2019, articulating a process of discerning curatorial behaviours that enable and hinder conciliatory actions. My selection is, of course, subjective; framed through my perspective as a seventh generation (to the extent of my current knowledge) European-settler Canadian and the responsibilities to unlearn and relearn the histories of Canada bestowed on me through this inherited legacy. This text does not capture the entirety of the conversations and activities that took place; however, it aims to address common threads across readings, conversations, and observations—particularly expectations, power, boundaries, and support. The fragmented nature of these entries further demonstrates the non-linear pathways of knowledge, and many questions rest unresolved.

Week 1

April 12, 2019—Radical Practice

I began week one by reading Cultivating Joy as Radical Practice (Neumark & Van de Pol 2017).

Devora to Jen: “the performativity of negation” (Neumark & Van de Pol 2017, 20)

I exhaled so deeply when I read this line.

I had read it wrong, but it still shaped my perspective. I had read “negativity.” My thoughts were directed to cultures of busyness and exhaustion that are frequently sustained within gallery culture and result in unnecessary negative interactions and neglectful practices. “Toxicity (whether environmental or psychological) has to be first acknowledged, absorbed and transformed before wellness—and by extension, joy—is possible” (Neumark & Van de Pol, 20). How can curatorial hospitality bring us to generative and ethical places of being and working in relation?

I also want to understand where curation is inhospitable, to recognize learned patterns and behaviours of professional practice that arrest creative growth and hinder relationship building, truth-telling, and (re)conciliation based in trust, support, and accountability. Radical hospitality within the role of the gallery strives for self-awareness and self-reflexivity, inclusion, reciprocity, and the equitable valuation of interdisciplinary and multidimensional needs, knowledges, and experiences (Marstine 2017, 165). This work pushes against the commodification of the art experience and arts administration as ‘service,’ often undertaken as hierarchical labour and understood through the frames of gender, class, and race (Burton, Jackson & Willsdon 2016, xvi). It is furthermore linked to curatorial care. Though ubiquitous as an etymological scaffold for curatorial discourse, concerns of the curatorial as care in relation to this project are not rhetorical, but speak to the realities of colonial capitalist-model hyper-productivity (Miner 2018, 131). Such over-commitment appears to be entrenched in curatorial bodies and overshadows slower and considered processes that may allow better care for the self (reconnecting body, mind, and land) to better care for and communicate with others (Jennifer Van de Pol in conversation with author, April 27, 2019).

April 13, 2019—Curatorial Culture

An emerging artist participating in the Saturday gathering on compassionate practice spoke about their recent sculpture and sound installation that addresses, firstly, the expectation and action of being told to speak up in classroom or public circumstances, in addition to behavioural expectations placed on us by others for us to embody. They spoke about the shift that could take place if others, instead, leaned in; listened more carefully. In discussion with other participants, they reflected on how their own installation is actually not fully accessible and considered a number of possible future changes. I was grateful for this conversation, as I had witnessed a similar circumstance in my first week teaching introductory Art History at a local university where an instance of seemingly unconscious disregard had occurred between an older student and a younger student. The installation the emerging artist spoke about at the Saturday gathering is a profound response to experiences such as these. I observed how related actions played out throughout the afternoon, between various participants holding various positions of power.

Following the day-long gathering at CVAG, Celine, her dog, Troy, and I walked to the park. To breathe new air; to give Loup space to run. Our conversation immediately turned to facilitation.

“What kind of culture exists currently in the curatorial world, and what might setting up boundaries for both the curator and the artist look like?” Celine asked.

“Curatorial culture exists differently in every institution,” I responded. “There’s an assumption coming into a space that because you operate as a curator or as an artist, you already understand the rules, but they are so nuanced and they don’t always transfer. Especially when we’re trying to work cross-culturally. Boundaries are sometimes established with the contract, but without it, certain boundaries may not be made explicit” (Celine Trojand and Troy Moth in conversation with author, April 13, 2019).

Unspoken rules that maintain unquestioned power structures frequently prevent access and engagement. In “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” an essay brought to my attention by Celine, Jo Freeman ([1972] 2013) outlines ways in which power imbalances develop and are exercised when roles and responsibilities are not determined, or are assumed (232-33). The deployment of unwritten rules governs activities through hegemony maintained as “covert social networks [that] unite cultural producers and their supporters in contexts regulated by strict social codes and behaviours” (Soskoline 2016, 32). Freeman asserts, “Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware” (232).

Like curatorial culture, curatorial hospitality is uniquely defined through specific relationships, circumstances, and within each organization. During the Great Oceans Dialogues symposium in Vancouver in September 2019, Rhéanne Chartrand, curator of Indigenous Art at the McMaster Museum of Art, posed a simple, yet provocative, question from the audience: “What do artists need?” Paralleling processes and points of contact articulated by Morin for the TRC, Chartrand’s question also speaks to a community engagement strategy communicated by Celine as we walked through the park: “Good support actually looks like good boundaries! … Ask the group: What do you need? How do you need us all to show up for you to be able to show up?” Making expectations transparent and establishing the needs and norms of a group, or working relationships, additionally addresses the location and structural dynamics of power and accountability (Celine Trojand and Troy Moth in conversation with author, April 13, 2019).

In thinking seriously about the relationships of settler-established art spaces and Indigenous artists and communities, Chartrand’s and Celine’s questions solicit curators and arts workers to support the complex and oscillating positions of guest and host in unceded and Treaty lands. For settler and non-Indigenous curators, showing up is also learning the histories and protocols of the territories within which they practice and of the artists with whom they work; a willingness to work outside of Eurocentric curatorial conventions; and assuming responsibility to “act accordingly” (Long Soldier 2019, 96). This equally extends to learning the significance of the TRC Calls to Action to the Indigenous communities they work with and throughout the structural makeup of art spaces. In the service of decolonial processes and institutional change, what does accountability look like across all levels of an organization?

Figure 3. Peterson Creek Community Garden (Bread, Flesh & Ink), digital photograph, 2018. Photo: Toby Lawrence.

Week 2

April 18, 2019—Expectations and Boundaries

My first visitor today entered the space while asking: “Are you the vegetable lady?”

“I suppose,” I replied, with hesitation and inquisitive lilt.

“This is not what I expected.”

I briefly explained the project and the images as catalysts for this research around curatorial hospitality. I imagined the title image (fig.3) as a metaphorical offering—a photograph depicting a green basket of vegetables and flowers, taken on a hot, smoky day in August as part of Bread, Flesh & Ink, while Lindsay harvested her crop from her community garden plot in Kamloops.

“What does a curator do?” He remained standing following my invitation to join me around the table. He listened to my response long enough to attach his own personal narrative and need. A self-taught artist born in the Okanagan who had long ago declined commercial representation.

I let the conversation move along organically. Observed where he would take it. The visitor had been building a greenhouse for his wife and talked extensively of his own lineage. I have been spending time in the archive trying to better understand my own lineage as a settler-Canadian, so I spoke about a few of my findings. He asked a number of personal questions without hesitation or apparent consideration to the framing offered by the space.

“Are you married? Is your home tidy? I bet it’s very minimal.” I am recalling some of his assumptions. “You’re doing a PhD at your age? Right.” His voice trailed off.

I consciously engaged, again letting the visitor direct the conversation, but I should have evaded these questions. I hadn’t explicitly established any boundaries. I should have asked what his expectation was.

What if I had lied to the visitor? I recounted my experience to Angela when she stopped in later that afternoon. We were looking at a print-out of Hamington’s (2010) article on feminist hospitality marked in pink highlighter and talking about social contracts that validate truths in specific ways relevant to circumstance. She reflected on her own activities and encounters of the past few days: Law documents recount truths through written documentation; equally, oral histories recount truths though the specificities of how and by whom histories are told may change.

Boundaries. I still want to be guarded in a professional context, but what is my responsibility as a guest? I feel there is an expectation that I/guests/artists/curators will always tell the/our truth/s (but according to whose social contract). All those personal details that I have trained myself to be careful not to ask because those may not be stories for me to know or tell. How can curation offer support for truth-telling, genuine reception—and boundaries?

April 20, 2019—The Role of the Curator

Michelle Jacques joined me in the galley as a discussant today. This morning, before picking her up in Cumberland on route to the gallery, I went for a walk along the trail at the edge of the Cumberland Community Forest. I was led further along the path by the increasing volume of a chorus of frogs, hidden from view in the marsh. Groundings.

Our conversation revolved significantly around the interplay of hospitality and hostility, and the role of the curator. The singularity of curatorial authorship, or expertise, has been challenged many times over in art historical discourse, yet it remains the primary model of curatorship within the collective imaginary of settler-dominant culture. Michelle perceptively expressed that there is hostility within the restrictive definition of the curator as “expert” and in obscuring dialogic and collaborative processes. Such obfuscations limit opportunity for multivocality within the interpretation and transmission of knowledge (Michelle Jacques in conversation with author, April 20, 2019). Offering balance to these points of hostility, Janet Marstine’s (2017) assertions on radical hospitality place at the centre “the notion that all parties enter collaborations with expertise and that art historical expertise is no more valuable than other kinds of competencies” (165). In application, Marstine’s statement actively challenges conventional positioning of the curator as sole expert, to draw relationships into discourse through difference and interdisciplinarity.

Thinking through the role of the contemporary curator additionally requires focus on the labours of support that hinge curatorial practices. Helena Reckitt (2016) makes an important distinction between curatorial labour that augments the cultural capital of the curator and the gestures of hospitality that nurture relationships within and beyond the gallery and are the scaffold to the exhibitionary event (6-9). “Generally, the art world operates on the principle that the work involved in mounting cultural projects should be obscured in order to let the work of art shine” (19). This mode of operation, however, facilitates the needs and import of some above the rest, where cultures of expectation and convention linger through modernist conceptions of curatorial expertise and artistic singularity. Feminist and relational curatorial methodologies work in opposition and engage a network of discourse and intellectual interlocutors in ideation, production, and support. Still, Reckitt exposes that the allocation of curatorial care and support is not uniformly disseminated, received, or managed (11). I have been thinking about this extensively over the past year. At the 2nd annual Islands Curatorial Collective gathering in Courtenay in May 2018, Michelle offered the salient observation that there can be a point in curation where it breaks from mutuality into subservience. Wherein, the curator is no longer working with the artist, but to serve the artist, or vice versa. How, then, do “guest” and “host” share in the responsibilities, both to give and to receive, and to maintain reciprocity? Naming curatorial hospitality establishes a framework to recognize the reciprocal labour that is already being done. Correspondingly, Reckitt asks “who is or who is not cared for?” (8). To that end, I ask, how does the enactment of curatorial care and support renegotiate power imbalance?

Week 3

April 23, 2019—Describing Hospitality

Much of the residency has been fragmented, with sporadic engagements, findings, and also frustrations. Ideas roll through my mind, loosely tied to one another, but often landing as a collection of quotations on difference, on expectations, on invitations…

Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, not the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. (Lorde 1983, 95)

The business of inviting, hosting, and of playing the role of a guest is a delicate one. One always has to negotiate between how one is expected to behave in somebody else’s space and the limits of the invitation. At the same time, one needs to define the thin line between one’s generosity and what one expects from the encounter with others. (Torres 2019, np)

“We never asked them to come here, but nevertheless we treated them kindly and hospitably and helped them all we could. They have made themselves (as it were) our guest” [The Sir Wilfred Memorial 1910, quoted in Willard 2021, 145]. Here the idea of “making” oneself a guest should be understood as a dishonorable position. The sacred guest is taken care of, it is a sacred act to visit another’s territory. With it, one brings new eyes to see the land and the people and new ideas and items for trade, and when a visitor approaches with honorable intentions, they are welcomed. However, this text uses the language, “they have made themselves our guest.” One must also understand that this is coming from an Indigenous perspective and early interactions with the Crown and French settlers as some of the first white settlers in Canada did promise nation to nation relationships. (Willard 2021, 145)

Taking curatorial hospitality seriously involves: care for the other, which arrives in the form of the work; care for the artist, with whom the work arrives; and care for the audience, who will arrive at the work. (Butt 2016, np)

As integrated theory and practice, curation encompasses a methodology that could be viewed as a fluid bringing together of ideas. Although often untethered and removed from their initial context, their proximity to one another allow new connections, ideas, and possibilities to grow. While searching for existing descriptions of curatorial hospitality, I came across the above proposal by Melbourne-based scholar and Local Time[3] member Danny Butt (2018) that operates much like a baseline. Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer (2016) further outline the curatorial-hospitality relationship through curatorial ethics, gifts and giving, and the inherent responsibility embedded within hospitality (9). Curatorial ethics are foundational to inter-personal encounters and exchange. Nevertheless, curatorial ethics are not static. They are negotiated through historical and cultural variables specific to a place and/or organization or individuals (Marstine, et. al 2016, np referenced in Campolmi 2017, 70). Through gifts and giving, relationships can be made tangible and culturally specific protocols can be enacted. Responsibility is embedded within such encounters, to not only acknowledge and respect difference, but also, as articulated by Butt, to “learn […] to live other models of hospitality, to continue to live with others with whom these models appear” (np).

April 25, 2019—Thresholds

I stopped for coffee at the Vault in Nanaimo, as I often do, on my way to Courtenay this morning. There, I read an interview between Jacques Derrida and Dominique Dhombres for Le Monde from December 2, 1997. Derrida’s work Of Hospitality is featured frequently in the scholarship on hospitality. He talks of thresholds. The citations are ubiquitous:

Nowadays, a reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers: between the foreign and the non-foreign, the citizen and the non-citizen, but first of all between the private and the public, private and public law, etc (Derrida & Dufourmantelle 2000, 47-48).

My first visitor today refused to cross the threshold (fig.4). An abstract line drawn between architectural points delineating the corridor from the studio. She stopped. I extended a pleasant invitation. She hesitated. She hinged her torso over the ‘line,’ with feet firmly planted in the corridor. Perhaps she misheard me. I restated and re-extended the invitation, but she contorted her face, refused again, and left.

For Rauna Kuokkanen (2008), drawing on Derrida, the threshold is inextricably tied to responsibility (76). In moving beyond the centricity of settler-colonial practices and ideologies, the threshold, like Hamington’s “border of membership” (28) can be approached as “a transgressive step” (Derrida 2000, 75 quoted in Kuokkanen 2008, 76). Superficially, this can be seen in the action of transgressing the threshold, or in turning away in inaction at the point of intolerance. Yet, it can also be approached as a conceptual space, as an intermediary where “Indigenous knowledge meets settler ways of being” returning again to Morin (2016, 71). A place to hold ourselves accountable, to reach into the uneasiness of what is yet to be known, to change the historical narrative.

Figure 4. Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures, Threshold View, 2019. Photo: Toby Lawrence.

April 27, 2019—Power

Returning to the gallery in the final week, I continue to reflect on the effectiveness of the format of Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures, the fragmented nature of this residency and research, the appropriateness of research in public, as a curator, in a city where I do not reside, am not employed, and my community connections are few. What does a gallery ask of its visitors and its guests? Of its curators? What are the responsibilities of the audience? During visits with invited discussants, I used prompts specific to each guest from past encounters to drive a semi-focused yet organic conversation. I found amidst these conversations, the specificities of gestures of hospitality were often made tangible through the stories told by my visitors. I was onsite a few days each week and during the days that I was not onsite, the studio offered, what I titled, the Pause: a gesture of hospitality that acknowledged the need for deliberate time for contemplation, as well as the impossibility of my being present at all times. A participatory activity encouraging visitors to write me a note or a letter recounting their own experiences of hospitality was developed to seed contemplation, solicit community response, but also to serve the gallery’s request for activity and material-based facilitation in my absence. Its effectiveness to better understand the community’s engagement with hospitality is immeasurable, as no one partook. Time constraints did not allow for a more thorough discussion around ways to effectively engage the Comox Valley community specifically, nor how to address this participatory element through the Pause. I feel the weight of this reality. Even in making space for gestures of hospitality, the pressure of gallery conventions, modernist conceptions of curatorial expertise, and culture of expectation persisted.

Today’s conversation with Jennifer Van de Pol and Nicole Crouch centered power and expectations. I set the space for visiting, and, arguably, for working in public view. Nonetheless, I continue to question how to manage boundaries through such immersive projects? Where is power located: When artists, communities, and curators (are asked to) put themselves on display? “To heal for others,” Nicole added.

Equally, where is power located: When objects, ideas, and cultures are brought together in public spaces? When organizations, artists, curators, programmers invite contributions and contributors? In consultation? In community? With paid or unpaid participation? These are not new questions.

“What is the next right action? What is our responsibility?” Jen asked.

“And where is it that you are situating the locus of the question?” Nicole responded.

“The status quo in this society tends to be very confused around selfishness, and the Self. Also creating an illusion of separation.” Jen gestured toward yogi praxis. “How can we use the way we create space in our bodies for breath as a way to create space in our life?” (fig.5)

Figure 5. Prompt by Jennifer Van de Pol, 2019. Courtesy of Toby Lawrence.

Nicole gestured towards a recollection of Spivak, “How do you make space for voices, and which voices, yet to speak?”

Returning to curation, and linking back to Fung, Jennifer probed: who holds power and how can personal agency be activated to enact change?

Nicole: “100%. Because it’s power! How do you bring that into the conversation? Along with the difference of power. It’s political and it’s financial. How do we raise people above the financial when they are happy to be comfy?”

Jen: “All the more reason that we need spaces like this to talk together, to support one another, so that there’s a feeling of safety or trust, or something built so that we hear ourselves and we hear each other and we understand that we don’t have to walk around carrying that take on that narrative from [management and funders]. We don’t need to keep repeating it, saying that’s what the expectation is, because that’s the expectation of fear.” Jen continued, “How can one lean into creating the emergent future, again, with hearing the loud voices, with these power imbalances?” (Nicole Crouch and Jennifer Van de Pol in conversation with author, April 27, 2019)

As illuminated in my visit with Jen and Nicole, power within art and exhibition spaces operates on several levels, including as sanctioned authority of social knowledge and history, where, in Joana Joachim’s (2018) words, “the pretense of ‘objectivity’ stands as a veiled means of enforcing Eurocentric standards for so-called high art” and against which all other traditions are measured (38). Without accurate and meaningful representation and voice, inaccurate assumptions about knowledge are produced and potentially presented to the public as authentic through the gallery or museum’s authoritative position that is upheld within the public imaginary. Still operating through colonial infrastructure, such assumptions are frequently used to guide institutional and professional activities and attitudes (Mithlo 2004). Similarly, Butt and Local Time (2016) speak to professional protocols of settler-established academic and gallery spaces and posit, “In the legacies of colonisation, these structures police boundaries between communities, inhibiting the productive exchange of autonomous practices across different archives and methodologies, particularly between settler and Indigenous worlds” (np). Such protocols limit equitable representation and operation on mutual and consensual terms. Fractured relationships and inequitable power stem from systemic hierarchies and positions of dominance “rooted in historical and colonial structural patterns that are normalized (perceived to be natural) and rewarded in society” (Jimmy & Andreotti 2019, 55). The decisions of the curator weighted with institutional power are therefore imperative in the fact that they “can either uphold the status quo of overrepresented whiteness in Canadian art history, or work toward dismantling it,” returning to Joachim (38).

April 28, 2019—How We Visit

Final Day. As we sat together in the studio this morning, Angela reflected on the contrast of simultaneous activities taking place across the gallery. While my residency revolved around space and time for visiting and intentional conversation, she had remained busy around me as administrative responsibilities limited the space in her workload to visit. This Project Room Studio residency followed a rich ongoing dialogue, unfolding over time, between myself and Angela and Denise Lawson, CVAG co-curators, across numerous visits in the past five years, on site, at Angela’s home, and in the context of other residencies, exhibitions, and gatherings. I had visited many times in the months leading up to April. So many possibilities for and aspects of this research and residency were discussed and debated over lunch or Americanos, supporting my inquiry and time in residence at CVAG. The significance of this sort of trust and relationship building is reflected by Dylan Miner (2016), who also speaks of time made for visiting. He begins,

Some time ago, during weekly conversations over aniibiishaaboo miinawaa

makademshkikiwaaboo // tea and coffee, Anishinaabe elders shared with me that in our contemporary lives under capitalism, we have precious little time to visit. Even when we have time, we must call ahead or send a text or send a Facebook message to plan a time in which we are “free” and can visit. (131)

Enacting the teachings of his elders, Miner embraces a “methodology of visiting” (133). The emphasis on social relations is foundational to this practice: “being together and visiting does the work of creating and maintaining community” (134). Prompted by Miner’s essay, conversations at the 3rd annual Islands Curatorial Collective gathering in Campbell River in August 2019 explored visiting as a fundamental part of curatorial practice, yet ultimately under-valued within many institutions and by funders. Further, the question of how we visit was also raised at the gathering, not only in relation to visiting with artists, artworks, and contributors, but, as importantly, with co-workers. Visiting with co-workers offers necessary opportunities for interpersonal dialogue, institutional self-reflexivity, and relationship building as essential elements of gallery culture and a project’s timeframe that are of equal importance as the more tangible components of the curatorial.

In reflection, focusing on the social responsibility of curatorship, visiting—one of the many gestures of hospitality—drives trust by “making one’s self present … and being attentive and responsive” (Hammington 2010, 26-27). This is central to collaboration, co-learning, and sincere activation of conciliatory actions, as much as it is central to potential philosophical and administrative change within art spaces. In conjunction with radical hospitality, adopting an intentional awareness of the dynamic perspectives and personal histories held within an organization or collaboration supports the many epistemological modalities. Responsibility is embedded within such encounters and protocols, not only acknowledging and respecting difference, but learning to understand in order to refuse socialized patterns and behaviours that impede equity and hospitality and, to reiterate, “learning to live other models of hospitality, to continue to live with others with whom these models appear” (Butt 2018, np).

Figure 6. Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures, Offerings, 2019. Photo by Toby Lawrence.

Notes

[1] I am using ‘the curatorial,’ here, as defined by Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff (2013): “If ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge” (6).

[2] Bread, Flesh & Ink, Krista Arias (Magdalena, NM), Lindsay Harris (Kamloops, BC), and Toby Lawrence (Victoria/Gabriola Island, BC), collaborative gatherings, 2017-ongoing. “We open ourselves to the troubled state of relational hospitality under spectres of displacement by invoking the reciprocity inherent in the P’urhépecha Juriatikua Uariri (Day of the Dead) ceremony, community relationships, and the activist potluck and offer intimate gestures of hospitality across boundaries of guest-host relations (invited/uninvited; living/dead; natural/cultural; embodied/parasitic; inscribed/fluid). … In our exploration of actions that trouble and counteract displacement through our unique positions as uninvited guests on colonized territories, our goal is to create an open, well-composted space of regeneration, negotiation, connection, and engagement—for bringing our hearts and minds together as one with each other and with the geographies that claim us all as we ceremonially offer and imbibe food, drink, smoke, and ink.” (Arias, Harris, and Lawrence, Project Description, excerpts, 2017)

[3] Local Time is an art and curatorial collective based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand and establish by Danny Butt, Jon Bywater, Alex Montheith and Natalie Robertson in 2007. Their work is often site-specific and undertaken in collaboration with local knowledge keepers. http://www.local-time.net

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Toby Lawrence is a settler-Canadian (English/Irish/Dutch) curator and writer based in lək̓ʷəŋən territory / Victoria, BC, joining the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria as Curator of Contemporary Art in 2024. Her curation and scholarship explore the potential of gathering and long-term relationship-building inside and outside of gallery spaces, centering collaborative and relational approaches. Toby is a co-founder of Moss Projects: curatorial learning + research program in collaboration with Michelle Jacques, funded through the Canada Council for the Arts and British Columbia Arts Council, and was a curatorial resident of the Otis College of Art and Design Emerging Curators Retreat in Los Angeles and a contributing curator for the inaugural Contingencies of Care Virtual Residency hosted by OCADU, Toronto Biennial of Art, and BUSH gallery. Recent publications include “Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation,” co-authored for PUBLIC with a French translation for the Journal of Canadian Art History, as well as “Curatorial Insiders/Outsiders: Speaking Outside and Collaboration as Strategic Intervention” in Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing and forthcoming chapters for Creative Conciliations: Reflections, Responses, and Refusals and Curatorial Contestations: Critical Methods in Contemporary Exhibition-Making in Canada.