Down Home, Dalhousie Art Gallery
Down Home is an exhibition that brings together nine contemporary artists of African Nova Scotian and African Canadian descent who use portraiture to explore different aspects of self, family, and community. By drawing on oral histories, textile traditions, and networks of faith, the artists’ richly layered perspectives invite reflection on the histories and enduring presence of Black communities in Atlantic Canada.
Navigating experiences of migration and displacement, Afro-diasporic peoples have come to understand themselves through shared histories and connections, cultivating a sense of self deeply rooted in communal identity. Foregrounding these social, spiritual, and cultural knowledge systems, the artists in Down Home collectively celebrate the influences that shape their lives, and which define Black identity across time and space.
As an exhibition, Down Home substantiates the power of alternative archival forms to preserve diasporic knowledge, sentiment, and cultural legacy. Fostering a space for reflection and connection, Down Home celebrates the resilience and creativity of Black communities, honouring past legacies while envisioning future possibilities.
a language of bodies, Vector Fest
a language of bodies is a language born to us. and yet, as we move about the world we lose the ability to speak in tongues of water and wind. instead, we become preoccupied with the governable, the classified, and the calculable. what would become of us if we learned, once more, to speak the language of life? a language of bodies brings together artists transcending sealed structures and exploding the classification systems which govern “bodies”. by engaging with somatic and ethereal forms, these artists are celebrating the undefined and uncontrollable. in doing so, they are reshaping the words used to separate and categorize and building a new language, one which is inside and outside, both and neither, nothing and everything, all at once.
throughout a language of bodies, filmmakers draw on their own identities and experiences to reflect on the restraints, both personal and societal, placed upon bodies. whether their film explores bodies of water, the human body, or bodies of knowledge, the artists ask us to consider the purpose of the classification systems in which we are wholly immersed. each artist rewrites the ‘rules’ of their existence to point toward new ways of being. they accept the unnamable and unruly and celebrate the ways bodies leak out of the borders in which we outline them. they are creating a language of bodies, a language borne of interconnectivity.
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Suppa Club
The Suppa Club was a collaborative social practice event put on by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa and Temple Marucci-Campbell. At the intersection of art and food, their theses shared a common goal of exploring the ways diasporic archives of thought and memory are formed and accessed through oral history, acts of care, and somatic experience. Members of the OCAD community who self-identify as Black were invited to share dishes made by the artists and engage in mindful, generative conversation.
In collaboration with Madison Nadurata, Kayla Bullen, Tristan Turigan, and Jada White.
Between Meals and Memories: Care as Access Point to Archives of Immaterial Knowledge
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Tell the Body, Vtape
In her program, Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa brings together video works that explore the relationship between language and the senses as constructions of knowledge. Through videos of poetry, dance, oral history, and documentary, layers of thought are uncovered, giving form to the immaterial nature of language. Tell the Body explores the capacity for language, the immaterial, to be given physical form within the body through Afro-diasporic experience. The program touches on the capacity for the immaterial to inform the physical, producing ways of knowing that are sensuous in nature and exist in material form only within individual bodies, returning to a space of liminality as they are passed from one to another.
Following the launch of the final title in her program Hamartia by Louise Liliefeldt, on March 23, 2022, curator Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa hosted a live conversation with some of the artists featured in her program, moderated by Dr. Andrea Fatona.
Stream it here