Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs

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Ken Lum, "117 Dwight Eisenhower Blvd," 2009

plexiglas, enamel paint, powder-coated aluminum, 97" x 82" x 2”. Courtesy the artist & Royale Projects, Los Angeles.

Artist Talk by Ken Lum

Thursday, November 1, 2018 | 7pm

Held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery 300 Memorial Blvd, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

Shannon Bool • Natalie Czech • Fabiola Carranza •  Raven Chacon (with Laura Ortman and Suzanne Kite) • Leah Decter • Sameer Farooq & Jared Stanley • Theaster Gates • Hassan Khan • Ken Lum • Sylvia Matas • Jeanne Randolph.Curated by Sarah Nesbitt and Jenifer Papararo

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is eager to announce the opening of our fall exhibition, Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs. Structured around general notions of indexing, collecting, cloaking and the reveal with a focus on material and an overlay of poetry – the exhibition is grounded in the use of text, often found, poetic, and colloquial, with historical and political narratives interwoven as material, including the popular Black cultural magazine Jet in Theaster Gates’s work Do I Know You, 2017; the Haitian Declaration of Independence in Liberté ou la morte by Fabiola Carranza; strip mall signage in Ken Lum’s 117 Dwight Eisenhower Blvd, 2009; and in recently uncovered medieval graffiti in All Saints Bench, 2018 by Shannon Bool.

Natalie Czech, Hassan Khan, and Sylvia Matas present language using banal everyday signifiers: magazine print ads, LED signage, or newspaper clippings, which they parse into poetic and political gestures. Jeanne Randolph, and Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley activate collections through ficto-criticism (Randolph) and speculative museums (Farooq and Stanley), and Leah Decter, like Carranza, excavates language from the archive of her maternal grandfather's ship's manifest coming in to Canada in her woven work, (through) line (age) 1779-1925-2013, 2013. As part of the exhibition Raven Chacon begins a new book project in dedication to the life of Zitkála-Šá, an early 20th century Yankton Dakota woman that will be comprised of twelve musical scores dedicated to twelve contemporary Indigenous women “working in the field of contemporary music performance or composition.”

The exhibition is to be read as one moves through it. Through a paring of objects and texts, how histories are captured and presented surface in prosaic terms, but carry the weight of history’s missteps and misrepresentations.