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Mackenzie

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Review

**Valérie Frappier** is a writer and curator of French settler ancestry from Aurora,  
Ont., currently based in what is now known as Toronto.

How can we think about place more expansively, and against behaviours like imposition, dispossession and extraction? The guiding question that curators Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien posed in response resonated throughout the Toronto Biennial of Art’s 72- day inaugural exhibition: “What does it mean to be in relation?” Indigenous, Canadian and transnational artists took up this question in pluralistic ways across the multi-venue exhibition focused on Lake Ontario’s watershed. Rather than perpetuate an anthropocentric, grid-like understanding of the city, a constellation of sites anchored by the lake spanned westward from Etobicoke Creek, eastward to the Port Lands and all the way north to where Black Creek flows past the Art Gallery of York University. What surfaced in response was an unearthing of knowledges that have been submerged through colonial-capitalist expansion. 

In thinking of what it means to be in meaningful relation to Toronto’s territory, an excavation of its histories must take place. The Jumblies Theatre & Arts with Ange Loft animated this history; _By These Presents: “Purchasing” Toronto_ (2019), an iteration of their _Talking Treaties_ (2017–ongoing) project, manifested as a multifaceted installation with weekly workshops at Mississauga’s Small Arms Inspection Building, informing audience members of Toronto’s Indigenous history and treaties, and asking participants to consider what treaty-making means to them. In the installation, a textile map of the city’s river network was surrounded by piles of various objects representing goods that were given by the British to the Mississaugas of the Credit in the alleged 1787 trade for Toronto, including kettles, glass jugs wrapped in fabric, mirrors and bags inscribed with a pound sign. In the group’s work, the much earlier land agreement of the Dish With One Spoon, made among the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations to peaceably share the region’s land, is also recalled, evidencing an altogether different understanding of this land and the beings that cohabitate it. These differences bring to mind what Hayden King—the writer and educator who recently announced that he “regrets” having written Ryerson University’s land acknowledgment, upon which so many others have been based—voiced: that treaties are not metaphors, and that the acknowledgement of these treaties today necessitates an ongoing commitment and obligation to action. 

Loft is also author of the Biennial’s _Toronto Indigenous Context Brief_, an inexhaustive working document she was commissioned to create by the Biennial to impart Indigenous histories of the region—many of which are complex and overlapping, and interrupt any prevailing, singular colonial narrative of Toronto— which the exhibition’s team and invited artists in turn used as a framework in their site-specific responses to place. Reflecting on this, Loft noted that, in Toronto, “Every time a condo goes up, they have to dig down. Exploring the changes in our city means we must also examine our foundations.” Such a literal unearthing materialized in Maria Thereza Alves’s _Garrison Creek_ (2019) at the 259 Lake Shore headquarters, an installation featuring a pile of jute bags filled with excavated soil from Bickford Park where the creek used to flow. Hung overtop the bags, a semi-transparent archival photograph of the Harbord Street Bridge showed the body of water before it was buried in the early 1900s. In Riverdale Park, a parallel sculpture titled _Phantom Pain_ (2019) consisted of five flat, curved steel markers, subtly embedded in the grass to outline the original route of the Don River prior to its straightening in the 1880s (an undertaking aimed at improving the movement of polluted waters, which only left the Don more susceptible to flooding). Together, Alves’s works conjured the memories of both waterways’ original routes, and displaced human-centred notions of time. 

Waterways and lands bear the weight of extractive behaviour, but intimate knowledge of and connections with these entities are a counterpoint to these abusive relationships, as evidenced in Caroline Monnet’s _The Flow Between Hard Places_ (2019). Made of Ductal® concrete, the sculpture depicted the sound waves produced when pronouncing _Pasapkedjinawong_, which means “the river that passes between the rocks” in Anishinaabemowin, creating a monument to the embodied knowledge contained within this word and the foundational connections to land embodied by those who speak it. The work’s sinuosity also made reference to other flows of resistance, such as when Chief Pakinawatik and 60 Algonquins of Kitigan Zibi—located in Quebec’s Outaouais region—made their way to Toronto in canoes to demand from the Governor General’s Office that sections of their traditional lands be restored to them. 

Flows contesting colonial boundaries were also mapped in Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s installation _Cihuapapalutzin_ (2019)—\_Tocihuapaplutzin\_ meaning “our revered lady butterfly” in Nahuatl—featuring 104 robotic monarch butterflies made from recycled cans in an ode to the sole species that migrates between Mexico and Canada. The monarchs’ flapping was fuelled by power boxes on which Palma Rodríguez had handwritten in Spanish and English _Sí a la vida, no a la minería_ and “Yes to life, no to mining”—referencing the mining activity in his home country of Mexico, which is overwhelmingly undertaken by Canadian corporations. Canadian mining companies account for roughly three-quarters of mining activity worldwide and many of which are headquartered in Toronto’s Financial District. In their video work _Pleasure Prospects_ (2019), the New Mineral Collective brought attention to Toronto as a nexus of extractive capital by showcasing scenes from the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada’s mineral exploration and mining convention hosted annually in the city. Through their proposed strategy of “counter prospecting,” the collective gestured to the possibility of relating with land otherwise, asking: “How to pierce the violence, not the surface?” 

Aspects of the mining industry were further contextualized in a Financial District walking tour titled _The Bank, The Mine, The Colony, The Crime_ (2019). As part of its extensive community programming, the Biennial partnered with WalkingLab and ReImagining Value Action Lab to invite activist and artist groups to participate in the tour, which brought to light the underlying implications of the sources of finance that feed the Toronto Stock Exchange. One such activist group was the Toronto-based Mining Injustice Solidarity Network (MISN), which works to resist and educate about the harmful practices of Canadian mining corporations in direct solidarity with affected communities. MISN addressed the lack of legal supervision holding Canadian mining companies liable for their operations abroad due to Canadian courts deeming these actions outside their jurisdiction, resulting in corporations’ abusive actions often going unchallenged. The group exemplified this phenomenon by discussing human rights and environmental abuses initiated by Canadian companies—including Yamana Gold in Argentina, Hudbay Minerals in Guatemala and Barrick Gold in Papua New Guinea—as well as highlighting how affected communities resist these violations, with some cases having successfully entered the legal system.

The Biennial itself was not immune to such flows of capital, with several mining companies providing noteworthy funding to the event. What is to be said of the Biennial’s decision to support knowledge production against extraction with backing directly from these funders, using its platform to commission artists and highlight activists challenging the extractive status quo? While ideally this money would be used to support communities experiencing the effects of these industries first-hand, such a flow of money is highly unlikely given that it would register as the companies’ admission of wrongdoing, and secondly, that such a degree of social service is rarely the domain of art— despite art’s earnest activist intentions. The question of this paradoxical income source of course concerns not just the Biennial but the wider Canadian art system as a whole, significantly steeped in questionable sources of capital. We are all entangled to various degrees and, as MISN reminds us, Canadians—whether consciously or not—hugely benefit from extractive investment, whether through our banks, pension plans and the economy more broadly. Ultimately, the Biennial’s use of such funds both epitomizes and attempts to navigate the contradictions of our economic present. 

Overall, the Biennial brought up complex questions around land and justice, providing space for meaningful knowledge-sharing and acts of repair to take place, the most potent strategy for which was that of relation. In the words of Loft: “Being in relation takes time, energy, and investment to learn what is in between— what holds us up and what keeps us together.” With this commitment to each other, to the non-human and to thoroughly examining our foundations’ flows—both material and immaterial—the groundwork for repair can continue to be sowed, watered and hopefully extended to more long-term justice initiatives as the Biennial readies its next iterations.

Writer

Criticism, Again

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Valérie Frappier reviews _The Shoreline Dilemma_ exhibited at the Toronto Biennial of Art (September 21–December 1, 2019).

The Shoreline Dilemma

Alex Quicho is a writer and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. _Small Gods_, her book on terror and transcendence in drone technology, was published by Zer0 Books in 2021. 

Heading to _On Venus_, Patrick Staff’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery, I crossed Hyde Park on foot. Rain poured from an open, sunlit sky. A real rainbow arched over Winter Wonderland, the holiday-themed amusement park that occupies the royal lands over December, where empty rollercoasters rattled along and strains of Frank Sinatra drifted across the grass, serenading no one. Birds swarmed overhead; the river teemed with animal life; and I entered the Serpentine via automatic doors that may as well have been an airlock, sealing off the arid, burning hostility of _On Venus_ from the wet and fertile Earth. Staff had transformed the ordinarily picturesque building with a number of architectural interventions that made up the site-specific work _Acid Rain_ (2019)—first, transparent coloured panels arranged over the building’s generous skylights, turning the gallery’s vessels of sunlight into urine-hued vats. Throughout, the floors were coated in gleaming chrome, and a system of thin pipes laced across the ceiling, intermittently dripping a mysterious liquid into rusting oil drums below. A lone jellied print of an acid-eaten gargoyle, _Gargoyle (the throat)_ (2019), guarded the building’s entrance, cueing me into absorbing the building’s new atmosphere as one that was intentionally poisoned, potentially dangerous to forms of life. 

From time to time, an industrial clamour filled the gallery, superseding the slow percussion of drips and drops. Curious, I went straight to its source: _On Venus_ (2019), a single-channel snuff film projected onto a Perspex® screen in one of the gallery’s two central rooms. The clang of metal gates; rotors whirring; blades being sharpened or cleaving down into flesh: it became evident that I was hearing the sounds of a slaughterhouse, scrubbed of the squeals of animal death. In the few minutes that I could stand to watch, a cow gazes into the camera as it is being killed; its face is caught in a lag of time, still alive as its body dies, looking surprised as blood cascades abruptly from its mouth. Another beast is yanked up to the slaughterhouse ceiling and split down the middle, spilling its guts. The found footage is treated so that its colours are inverted into biting pinks, blues and yellows, mercifully estranging the scenes from pure gore. They look like afterimages—the way that too-bright objects sear into our closed eyelids, our eyes’ response to visual overstimulation, bringing to mind how a traumatic event can linger with us long after its occurrence. 

Here, I thought of how Whitney Claflin, reviewing Juliana Huxtable’s _Interfertility Industrial Complex_ (2019), wrote: “PTSD may be the main ingredient in most of our food,” a claim that I would extend to everything that is industrially produced. The slaughterhouse is the genesis of the assembly line, as Nicole Shukin writes in _Animal Capital_ (2009). The blood and guts processed by the phalanxes of stationary workers, each responsible for a single repetitive task, inspired Henry Ford’s lust for mass production, bringing the logic of the abattoir to the factory floor. So goes the history of the terrible conditions that now beget what we eat, wear and enjoy. Even film is made from gelatin, derived from the boiled bodies of the animals depicted—a materiality we’re coaxed into considering as Staff scratches and corrodes individual film frames. These abstract marks dance across the thrumming accumulation of death, mingling between the bodies of the factory worker and the animal, each subjected to the meat grinder of capital. 

The adjacent chamber houses _On Living_ (2019), an arrangement of metal cubes etched with reproductions of articles from British tabloids: _The Sun_ and _The Daily Mail_, publications notorious for their extreme conservatism and wide readership. All feature variations on the same theme: an entirely false story about murderer Ian Huntley, circulated between 2017 and 2018, claiming that he wished to undergo a gender transition while in prison. Huntley himself is not really the subject here; rather, it’s the machinery of the press and how harmful myths take mass root. In the original articles, transphobic “experts” chime in to fabricate the link between murderousness with transgenderism, eager to legitimize bigotry. All slick surface and dim, unmoving presence, the blocks are eloquent on the subject of conservative social norms: how stubbornly they root, and how frictionlessly they circulate. In contrast to the gruelling task of resistance, where tireless investment seems to yield only nominal advancements of safety or freedom, marginalizing forces spread rampantly like contagions. 

Staff has long been interested in how surviving violence also requires violence — by no means at equivalent scales. Their previous video installation, _Weed Killer_ (2017), cast trans-identifying actors to perform sections of Catherine Lord’s cancer memoir _The Summer of Her Baldness_ (2004), where Lord refers to chemotherapy as “mainlining weedkiller.” Hormonal therapies, too, carry a risk of bodily destruction, with one understudied effect being a heightened risk of cancer. Conflating the two treatments, Staff taps the well of violence that feeds modern medicine: chemo was accidentally discovered during research into using mustard gas as a weapon; hormone pills are still derived from the urine of mares trapped in interminable breeding cycles. Still, _Weed Killer_ ends with an irradiated ode to contamination—embracing the implied toxicity of “lovesickness,” with its blurred boundaries, the intermingling that togetherness demands. It pushed back, cautiously, against the quarantine, segregation, erasure and disposability that come as off-label uses of the medical institution. 

_On Venus_ possesses no such final optimism. The show’s reigning planetary metaphor expresses, not the uninhabitability of another world, but that of our own. A poem written by Staff flickers in slanted subtitles across blank, damaged film, transmitting a story of sickliness inside and out. It describes a world rubbed raw by its own harsh climate, populated by creatures eaten away by acid and medicine: “dogs with guts / full of — something / like wailing / \_ and sobbing / like buildings.” This is no sci-fi: as Staff says in an interview with _TANK Magazine_‘s Lydia Figes, “I’m ambivalent about talking about the future; hell is now.” Later, I learned that the entire gallery was once an arms cache for the ruling classes of London, who wanted weapons close to hand in the event of a people’s uprising. On Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love and beauty, as on Earth, all suffering is entangled; the weight of oppression may be distributed multiply, unevenly, but its source is the same. 

Leaving the central room that contained _On Venus_ (2019), I felt newly sensitive to the subtext of the exhibition and beyond. The reflective floors were those of the slaughterhouse, perpetually rinsed of blood. The leaky circulatory system of _Acid Rain_ (2019) turned the building into a sick body labouring, like all of us, towards an impossible equilibrium: that of desire sated, of a system in perfect balance, begging the question: what must die in order for us to stay alive? And more importantly, what constitutes “us”? Disconcerted, I left the way I came, skirting the theme park and its rollercoasters, whose mechanical sounds and juddering tracks now resembled the meat-packing plant, the swinging cars like carcasses on their hooks. I sat alone in a restaurant and stared at the shining, stainless-steel surfaces of the open kitchen, the knives and cleavers on the wall. I felt more than a little sick, thinking of the ways that we fail to live without cruelty. 

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Alex Quicho reviews British-born, Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Staff’s exhibition _On Venus_ at Serpentine Galleries in London, UK (November 8, 2019–February 9, 2020)

On Venus: Patrick Staff

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