Diana Sofia Lozano's work, "A Fruiting Body is Responsible for Which of the Following" is featured in Shalaka Jadhav's exhibition "To Broadcast is to Scatter," on now until Feb. 10.
To Broadcast is to Scatter on now at School of Art Gallery
Shalaka Jadhav’s exhibition illuminates the connections between the human and non-human world
Don’t miss your chance to see To Broadcast is to Scatter, curated by Shalaka Jadhav at the School of Art Gallery. The exhibition explores the ways humans organize time and its implications on memory.
“When this exhibition was first pitched in 2021 for the Visiting Curator Program, it looked very different,” says Jadhav.
“During the first few years of the pandemic, I began to tend to kitchen projects that unfolded over long periods of time. This included fermentation and preservation projects, which helped renew my relationship to time: instead of keeping time using calendars, I instead fell into a rhythm: check on the SCOBY, burp the sourdough, check the texture on the quick pickles – are they ready yet?!”
“This new relationship to time was really interesting to me.”
“When I started to talk to artists during studio visits about these observations, the works slowly meandered into a place of family stories, collective memory, and leaned into a sort of rhizomatic thinking that I was really grateful to be invited into,” continues Jadhav.
The human insistence on organizing time
A rhizome is a continuously growing underground stem which puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.
Jadhav was guided by the principles of the rhizome as a network of connections with no beginning and no end. The exhibition was also informed by the concept of “thick time.”
“This question of “how may we lean into an understanding of time as rhizomatic?” is yes, about re-framing our relationship to time, and bringing attention to the human hierarchies of time, which is used as an omnipresent organizing tool in our lives, but also thinking about reframing our relations,” says Jadhav.
“Cultural scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker propose the idea of “thick time” — which is also such a juicy term! — and within the thick time model, layers of time stack together, expand and contract. This model encourages us to refuse a distinction between the human and non-human world, and instead, embrace an embodied understanding of ourselves as deep archives.”
Memory is inextricably linked to place, and another theme that runs through the exhibition is land and displacement.
Jadhav, who is originally from India and lived in Dubai before migrating to Canada, trained as an urban planner at the University of Waterloo and worked in the climate space before joining the cultural studies department at the University of Winnipeg. Jadhav currently practices as an independent curator.
“When my family migrated to Canada, naturally, we sought out community. This process of “settling” raised questions for me around belonging, power and authority, and ultimately, how we locate ourselves,” says Jadhav.
“These questions led to me pursuing my first degree in urban planning, but during my degree, I felt really unsettled by this idea of ‘planning for land-use, not for people.’ It signaled to me that there was an oversimplification within the discipline that prevented an understanding of our interdependencies.”
This observation is explored as a theme in the exhibition, with several exhibition artists considering this severed connection between human and non-human relations.
In the exhibition, seth cardinal dodginghorse’s “last night I dreamt I was home again, 2023,” explores the artist’s family’s dislocation from their ancestral lands for the construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road, a major highway project that irreversibly disrupted the land.
“What does it mean to plan for “land-use;” is the land only here to be used, extracted from?” asks Jadhav. “This desire of control is particularly troubled when thinking about how hypercategorization serves the goals of colonization to sever these innate land-body relationships by categorizing the world as resources to be depleted.”
The exhibition features works by seth cardinal dodginghorse, Cadence Planthara, Diana Sofia Lozano and Natalia Villanueva Linares, along with June Canedo de Souza and Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind.
This is the third and final exhibition of the School of Art Gallery’s Visiting Curator Program, generously supported by Michael F.B. Nesbitt. Launched in Summer 2021, this initiative supports curatorial research, exhibitions, events, and publications by emerging and established guest curators alike.
The Visiting Curator Program is a catalyst for international-calibre exhibitions and aims to play a vital role in defining contemporary art and its attendant discourses in the Prairies. It gives students, faculty, and other community members meaningful opportunities to engage with curators charting bold new trajectories in their field. Through a significant mentorship component, it aims to foster strong new voices in this discipline.
To Broadcast is to Scatter is currently on display at the School of Art Gallery until Feb. 10.
Performance on Jan. 25
On January 25, artist seth cardinal dodginghorse will perform Dirt Dance #3, as part of the exhibition programming.
seth cardinal dodginghorse is a Tsuut’ina/Blackfeet/Saddle Laake Cree multidisciplinary artist, Prairie Chicken Dancer, experimental musician and cultural researcher.
In 2014 their family was forcibly removed from their homes and land for the construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. This life changing event has been the focus of their creative work.
In the 2019 performance of Dirt Dance, the artist imitated the movement of construction vehicles to tell the story of their family’s displacement from their home during the construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. For To Broadcast is to Scatter, seth will be performing a new version of the dance, which will involve using pirate radios to broadcast recorded dreams.
seth cardinal dodginghorse: Dirt Dance #3
Thursday, Jan. 25
7-7:30 p.m.
School of Art Gallery
255 ARTlab
180 Dafoe Road