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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Workman 1

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Review

**Aryen Hoekstra** is an artist based in Toronto, where he currently serves as the Director of G Gallery.

Upon entering Éclair’s storefront gallery, the space’s former life as a succession of functioning bars is immediately evident. The right wall of the front room is decorated in small bronze-coloured glass tiles, lending to the exhibition, on a sunny afternoon, the warm shimmer of a newly minted penny. The remaining walls are a combination of cracking and peeling plaster and paint, architectural remnants that give way to speculation about a series of hastily completed renos and even quicker exits. Galleries such as Éclair, which opt to leave the spaces they inhabit intact rather than rolling everything over in white, are an increasingly common and needed break from the conventions of the white-cube’s so- called neutral display strategies. As well as acknowledging that this supposed “neutrality” was always a myth, they also offer artists a site against which to respond, often producing results that wouldn’t otherwise have been generated. Other examples of less conventional exhibition spaces include Long Island City’s Sculpture Center, a former trolley re- pair shop, and Montreal’s Parisian Laundry, a former industrial laundry, both of which have given host to solo exhibitions by Rochelle Goldberg in the past two years. What differentiates Éclair from these larger industrial spaces is its intimacy; bars are built to house bodies, not objects or manufacturing. Perhaps in part, it is because of this that Goldberg’s exhibition _Pétroleuse_ feels especially bodily in this setting.

Éclair’s history also provides a fitting context for Goldberg not only to continue her ongoing investigation of the material, economic and geopolitical properties of oil, but to explicitly consider the violent relationship of human bodies to industrialization’s most contested resource. The Pétroleuses was the name given to a group of female supporters of the Paris Commune who were the subject of a popular rumour that claimed they had been involved in the burning down of private and public buildings in the Commune’s final days. The Paris Commune sought to form a socialist government in Paris following the defeat of Napoleon III, holding power for about two-and-a-half months in 1871 before being defeated by the French national army. After Paris had been recaptured by the Loyalists, word circulated that a group of working-class women, sympathetic to the Commune, had thrown bottles of lit petroleum (early Molotov cocktails) into the cellar windows of buildings across Paris in a final act of defiance against the Versailles government. These rumours were of course untrue, merely an attempt to paint the Communards as unnatural, destructive brutes. Perhaps the plans of the Commune too were first hatched in a bar – a gathering place for bodies set upon a collective revolutionary act. In _Pétroleuse_, the often-abstract realities and ramifications of petropolitics are drawn closer to the body, with oil acting as a lubricating agent for radical transformation.

Retained from the building’s previous use is the division of the space into two connected yet distinct rooms, and Goldberg has effectively created two connected yet distinct installations. In the front, the tiled wall supports one edge of a well-worn rug slumped against it, its design so badly faded from use that it is a challenge to recognize anything of its original Baroque patterning. A subtle narrative can be found ingrained in its tired fibres: a luxury object removed from a bourgeois home and repurposed once its value had expired. A segment of the rug has been cut away and covered, in part, with a plastic sheet. Layered between the plastic sheet and the rug is a grouping of glass bowls pushed towards the wall and filled with water that has spilled out onto the plastic covering. Added to the water is a littering of gold glitter that has begun to break apart, producing an oily residue that stretches across the surface of the liquid. Its appearance verges on the alchemical, mixed together to produce something more than its constituent parts, a volatile concoction. Around the bowls is a collection of mouldy celeriac bulbs pierced with bronze casts of wicks, alluding to a potential destructive act.

The rear space is somewhat smaller but has been doubled in appearance by the addition of a set of mirrored tiles that reflect an existing set left by one of the previous owners. Here, two smaller rugs appear, as equally worn as that in the front, again covered with bulbous celeriac bombs, and an arrangement of LED lights that gesture toward lines of connection like an excavated subterranean root system. Standing above is a vertical armature, shrouded in gauzy silk and topped with the bronze mask of a woman’s face, eyes closed, turned towards the gallery entrance.

While researching the accused female incendiaries of the Paris Commune and the revolutionary government they hoped to form, the word that kept springing to my mind was the Greek polis, which literally translates to city, but which can also mean a body of citizens. The Paris Commune was an attempt at socialist self-governance within the space of a city, but in the context of Goldberg’s exhibition I’m more curious about the body of citizens that gathered to produce it, however briefly. Standing in a space that bears the traces of a life that was once a bar, questions emerge that might not have otherwise been generated. How might bodies gather, connect and work together toward a politics that extends itself through interconnectivity? What shift takes place when a collective movement is ascribed the attributes of a single body rather than a collection of individuals? Goldberg’s exhibition oscillates between the two, as the multiple becomes the singular and vice versa through historical reference and material enactment. In Reza Negarestani’s ficto-theory-thriller novel _Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials_, oil is described as the lubricant of all historical and political narratives. Goldberg’s _Pétroleuse_ is steeped in both, adding to this that oil might also be productive as an emulsifying agent, capable of dissolving the singular into the collective. Here, such a mixture unearths petro-politics from the hidden, the subterranean and the universal to something more visible and particular: binding and coating bodies to one another until boundaries leak away, and providing the material means to produce a collective action.

Writer

Trust

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Aryen Hoekstra reviews Richelle Goldberg’s exhibition _Pétroleuse_ at Éclaire, Berlin, Germany. (April 28 – June 17 2018).

Rochelle Goldberg: Pétroleuse

Vince Rozario is an independent critic, curator, writer, arts administrator, and community organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. They have published writing in _C Magazine_ and _Momus_, and contributed to exhibition texts for Xpace, Whippersnapper Gallery, InterAccess, and Gallery 44\. They were the winner of the 2018 C New Critics Award and the 2021 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

In the warm sunlight of a late summer afternoon, a curious pastel pink tableau – seemingly, a diorama of a suburban living room – occupies a storefront in Toronto’s Chinatown. The stifling heat inside is palpable. _Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue_ delves into mental health, trauma and memory, as experienced through a South Asian diasporic lens, broaching a sensitive discourse on mental health wherein whiteness is often disproportionately centred. 

These themes are fraught within an exhibition complex which aestheticizes and intellectualizes racialized trauma for colonial consumption. Racialized artists are often expected to perform the role of the “native informant.” Critical consensus often relegates work exploring race and identity to the realm of the pseudo-political, or vanity-driven. A racialized depiction of mental anguish is often either trivialized as anecdotal or expected to encompass the entirety of a communal experience. Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti deftly navigate the challenges of presenting confessional work as racialized femme artists – or “bearers of race,” as Hannah Black[^1] writes – by way of an extended visual conceit which plays with indexicality and memory.

The installation comprises an assemblage of peculiar furniture and anachronistically assembled bric-a-brac: a model auto rickshaw, a screen-printed stool made by kutti’s grandmother, a lamp embellished with pressed flowers, dying houseplants, novelty votive wall hangings bearing the evil eye and a sandalwood box with a secret stash and bong, among other items. While some of these objects are particular to South Asian households, it is in fact a familiar suburban tableau. As a diorama, it appears authentic, save for minor yet evocative interventions in which the artists challenge the voyeuristic hegemonic gaze engendered by the diorama format. Appearing to be signifiers of otherness to an etic perspective, for the emic viewer, these interventions invoke a nostalgic relationship. Even this nostalgia, however, is problematized by kutti’s gestural interventions, which come in the form of graphic overlays on multiple surfaces. Traced schematic drawings on vellum are placed over old family photographs. A video work loops on the television; on the pink wall behind it, kutti has hand-painted, in a slightly darker shade of pink, a pattern of grimacing faces, recalling delirium. This interplay between static and dynamic components seems to viscerally conjure the thrall of a psychological nadir.

The accompanying text, sourced from Dhillon’s personal journals, oscillates between depressive inertia and cloying anxiety. It recounts the countless hours spent waiting in hope of treatment, support or even basic motivation. She articulates the exhaustion of confronting the systemic realities of being a racialized artist operating in circumstances of precarity. “I’m tired in all the ways that tiredness can manifest itself on both an emotional and mental level. I’m tired from following my mind, jumping through hoops, searching the cracks and crevices for pieces of ‘Myself,’ and consistently coming up short,”[^2] she opines. Impaired mental health and systemic trauma are expressly not mutually exclusive here, which is echoed in the exhibition’s title. While _Biting My Tongue_ evokes a suppression of rage and tacit resignation to systemic contingencies, _Biding My Time_ characterizes this period as one of anticipation, of a positive alterity.

kutti and Dhillon also confront the myth of the model minority. Dhillon criticizes the valorization of high-functioning depressives who fit conveniently into capitalist notions of productivity while the systemic factors affecting mental health in racialized communities are flattened. Exploitative labour and intergenerational trauma inform the work. In the exhibition text, Dhillon contrasts her psychological exhaustion with the physical exhaustion of her mother who endured years of strenuous manual labour supporting her family. She belies the sense of disappointment and frustration that comes with not being able to meet the expectations of a parent who has contributed toil and capital toward the prosperity of their child. In this way, Dhillon traces the bewildering trajectories that render trauma through successive generations, particularly as they relate to capital.

Recovery becomes contentious when even the holistic modes of addressing trauma available to racialized communities are co-opted by larger social and political systems. The exhibition’s central video work samples footage of Baba Ramdev, a celebrity yogi and business magnate at the helm of a multi-million-dollar business in pseudo-Ayurvedic products and quack remedies which promise relief from every conceivable ailment, from cancer to depression. He is also currently at the centre of multiple fraud and sexual abuse scandals related to his company, Patanjali.[^3] Orientalist thirst for the exotic other, albeit appeased by opportunistic swamis and yogis from the time of Vivekananda in the early 20th century,[^4] pollutes centuries-old esoteric practices with pseudo-science and modern religious identity politics. The tongue-in-cheek video hints at a sense of betrayal at the failure of both traditional coping mechanisms and familial support networks against the countervailing pressures of consumer capitalism and border imperialism. kutti’s stash and bong, nestled within the confines of a carved sandalwood box, take this up, winking at contested cultural taboos and the stigma of self-medication in the absence of effective treatment.

While grappling with the complex intersections of mental health and race, _Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue_ still manages to hold space for those wounded by these realities. The fictitious domesticity of the space, its celebration of liminality and articulation of a hybrid diasporic aesthetic, invites viewers to converse and relate, both to the objects and each other. Across multiple visits, the space continued to facilitate kinship and solidarity. New friendships were forged, communal futures discussed and familiar humorous tropes regaled. In this interactive aspect, _Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue_ is at its most successful, engendering growth, healing and the possibility of reconciliation between oppositional cultural forces impacting mental health for racialized people.

[^1]: Hannah Black, “The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic,” _Artforum_ (Summer 2016).
[^2]: Exhibition text.
[^3]: Ben Crair, “This Multibillion-Dollar Corporation Is Controlled by a Penniless Yoga Superstar” (March 15, 2018); https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-15/this-multibillion-dollar-corporation-is-controlled-by-a-penniless-yoga-superstar.
[^4]: Girish Shahane, “Yoga Was Created 5,000 Years Ago, Right?” (January 7, 2015); https://scroll.in/article/699011/yoga-wascreated-5000-years-agoright.

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Exhibitions

Identity

This is an exhibition review by Vince Rozario of Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti’s project “Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue” at Whippersnapper Gallery, which ran from from August 7 – 27, 2017\. Rozario is the 2018 recipient of the C Magazine C New Critics Award.

Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti: Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue