Sunny Kerr is Curator of Contemporary Art at Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University and the curator of Drift: Art and Dark Matter.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and Professor at UBC’s Social Justice Institute-GRSJ and Adjunct Professor at Monash University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her artistic works include the films with Arjuna Neuman and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (Sao Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMA (New York). She has written for publications from Liverpool Biennale, 2017; Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14 and published in journals such as Canadian Art, Frieze, Pass, Texte Zur Kunst and e-flux. She has held visiting professorships at major universities in Australia, Brazil, Britain, Denmark, Germany and the United States and is a member of the collective EhChO.org and an editor of Third Text.
Nadia Lichtig is an artist currently living in the South of France. In her multilayered work, voice is transposed into various media including painting, print, sculpture, photography, performance, soundscape and song—each medium approached not as a field to be mastered, but as a source of possibilities to question our ability to decipher the present. Visual and aural aspects entangle in her performances. Lichtig studied linguistics at the LMU Munich in Germany and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France with Jean-Luc Vilmouth, where she graduated with honours in 2001, before assisting Mike Kelley in Los Angeles the same year. She taught at the Shrishti School of Art and Technology, Bangalore, India as a visiting professor in 2006, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Valence in 2007 and is professor of Fine Arts at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts of Montpellier (MOCO-ESBA), France since 2009. She has collaborated with musicians who are also visual artists, such as Bertrand Georges (Audible), Christian Bouyjou (Popopfalse), Nicolu (La Chatte), Nina Canal (Ut) and Michael Moorley (The dead C). Lichtig worked and works under several group names and pseudonyms (until 2009: EchoparK, Falseparklocation, Skrietch, Ghosttrap and Nanana).
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He is an artist, filmmaker and writer. With recent presentations at CCA Glasgow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manifesta 10, Marseille; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Forum Expanded, Berlin Berlinale; Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; Berlin Biennial 10, Germany; Serpentine, London X Qalandia Biennial, Palestine; Gasworks, London; Bold Tendencies, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT and Docslisboa, Portugal; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; Industry of Light, London; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art, Seoul amongst others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux.
Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz (FR), and currently lives and works in Paris. Ntjam is part of a generation of artists who grew up with the internet, communicating and sending images by electromagnetic wave. Working with video, text, installation, performance and photomontage, Ntjam creates a story with every piece that acts as a reflection of the world around her. Drawing connections to science fiction and the cosmos, Ntjam has said of her work, “I sat there some time ago with Sun Ra in his Spaceship experimenting with a series of alternative stories. An exoteric syncretism with which I travel as a vessel in perpetual motion.” Ntjam studied in Amiens and Dakar (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges (FR) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy (FR). Her works and performance have been shown at numerous venues such as the 15th Biennial of Lyon, DOC! Paris, a la Zentral (CH), Palais de Tokyo, Beton Salon, La Cite internationale des arts, la Bienanale de Dakar (SN), Let Us Rflect Festival (FR), FRAC de Caen, and CAC Bretigny.
Anne Riley is a multidisciplinary artist living as an uninvited Slavey Dene/German guest from Fort Nelson First Nation on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Her work explores different ways of being and becoming, touch and Indigeneity. Riley received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012 and has exhibited across the United States and Canada. From 2018 to 2020, she worked on a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver with her collaborator, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss. Riley and Wyss’s project, A Constellation of Remediation, consisted of Indigenous remediation gardens planted throughout the city. Riley and Wyss were longlisted for the 2021 Sobey Art Award. Since this project, Riley participated in the Drift: Art and Dark Matter residency and exhibition, creating works that consider the possibilities of making and being beyond the confines of Western institutions and extractive processes.
Jol Thoms is a Canadian-born, European-based artist, author and sound designer. Both his written and moving-image work engage posthumanism, feminist science studies, general ecology and the environmental implications of pervasive technical/sensing devices. In the fields of neutrino and dark matter physics he collaborates with renowned physics institutes around the world. These “laboratory-landscapes” are the focus of his practice led PhD at the University of Westminster. In 2017 Thoms was a fellow of Schloss Solitude and resident artist at the Bosch Campus for Research and Advanced Engineering. Thoms graduated with an Honours BA in Philosophy, Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and later studied under Simon Starling at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2013). Between 2014 and 2016 he developed and taught an experimental creative-research program for architecture students at the University of Braunschweig with then interim director Tomás Saraceno. In 2016 Thoms won the MERU Art*Science Award for his film G24|0vßß, which was installed in the Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art group exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Thoms is a lecturer in the MA Art and Ecology program at Goldsmiths University, London.
The following are resources related to the artists in Drift: Art and Dark Matter. This list is not exhaustive, but rather comprised of suggested readings compiled by researchers at the Belkin. These readings are intended to provide additional context for the exhibition and act as springboards for further research or questions stemming from the exhibition, artists and works involved. Following the introduction, resources are arranged by artist, listed alphabetically by last name. This compilation is an evolving and growing list, so check back in the future for more additions.
Intro
Suggested Further Reading
Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Hoboken, NJ: Polity, 2013.
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Suggested Further Reading
Barad, Karen. What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, virtuality, justice, no. 99. In 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series. Documenta 13. Kassel, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Exhibition publication.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Preface by Denise Ferreira da Silva,” in On this Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land. By Matt Hern, Selena Couture, Daisy Couture, and Sadie Couture. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing Company, Ltd, 2018.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal Beyond the Limits of Critique.” Philosophia vol. 8, no. 1 (2018): 19-41.
Sunny Kerr
Suggested Further Reading
Fernandes, Brendan, Nat Trotman, Amanda Jane Graham, Delinda Collier, Kevin D. Dumouchelle, Amanda Gilvin, Erica P. Jones, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and Textile Museum of Canada. Brendan Fernandes: Lost Bodies. Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2016.
Kerr, Sunny, Jocelyn Purdie, Mike Bayne, Maayke Schurer, and Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Déjà déjà Visité: Mike Bayne, Jocelyn Purdie, Maayke Schurer. Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, 2013.
Kerr, Sunny. “always swimming, always flying through vast air.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. MA Thesis. York University, 2006. https://www.proquest.com/docview/304983606?accountid=14656&pq-origsite=summon.
Sayej, Nadja. “INTELLIGENCE.” The Globe and Mail, Jul 28, 2007. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/intelligence/article690231/.
Traficante, Alana. “Exhibition Review: BRENDAN FERNANDES: LOST BODIES Curated by Sunny Kerr,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 6, no. 1 (2017): 153-156.
Nadia Lichtig
Suggested Further Reading
Lichtig, Nadia, Marion Dufour, Ludwig Seyfarth, and Monica Lebron. Nadia Lichtig: Pictures of Nothing. Berlin, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2014.
Maltzahn, Katrin von, Mona Schieren, and Franciska Zólyom. Re:BUNKER Erinnerungskulturen, Analogien, Technoide Mentalitäten. Berlin: Argobooks, 2019.
Arjuna Neuman
Suggested Further Reading
“Arjuna Neuman.” Glasgow International. https://glasgowinternational.org/artists/arjuna-neuman/.
Neuman, Neuman. “Multi-cultural Dread.” Audible Matter/Wave, no. 4. April 2021. https://infrasonica.org/en/audiblematter/multicultural-dread.
Neuman, Arjuna and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Email Correspondence between Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva 2017-2018.” In 4 Waters: Deep Implimancy exhibition at the Show Room, London, April 3-May 18, 2019. Exhibition Publication. https://www.theshowroom.org/library/email-correspondence-between-arjuna-neuman-and-denise-ferreira-da-silva-2017-2018.
Josefa Ntjam
Suggested Further Reading
Nair, Shraddha. “’Antibodies’ at Palais de Tokyo discusses body, boundary and its surrounding politics.” Stir World. April 5, 2021. https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-antibodies-at-palais-de-tokyo-discusses-body-boundary-and-its-surrounding-politics
Sirieix, Barbara. “Josefa Ntjam, Nominee of Prix 2020.” Aware Women Artists. Translated by Lucy Pons. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste_prixaware/josefa-ntjam/.
Villar-Perez. “Josefa Ntjam on heroes, authenticity, and the power of infiltration.” British Journal of Photography, 1854 Photography. May/June 2021. https://www.1854.photography/2021/06/josefa-ntjam-on-heroes-authenticity-and-the-power-of-infiltration/.
Anne Riley
Suggested Further Reading
Johns, Jessica. “Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities.” C : International Contemporary Art, no. 143 (Autumn 2019): 63-65.
Jol Thoms
Suggested Further Reading
Bakke, Monika. Art and Metabolic Force in Deep Time Environments. Environmental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2017): 41-59.
Barad, Karen. “Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable.” New Formations 92, no. 92 (2017): 56-86.
Englemann, Sasha and Jol Thomson. “Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory; or how the technosphere may come to matter.” The Anthropocene Review 4, no. 2 (2017): 81-91.
Song, Ningqiang and Aaron C. Vincent. “Discovery and Spectroscopy of Dark Matter and Dark Sectors with Microscopic Black Holes at Next Generation Colliders.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, no. 5 (2020): 1-6.
Thoms, Jol. “Diffractive Aesthetics & Holographic Literacies: Transcoding the Gigaton Volume Detector [A Diffracted Photo-Essay].” In Diffractive Reading: New Materialism, Theory, Critique Edited by Kai Merten, 235-248. Washington: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021.
Sunny Kerr is Curator of Contemporary Art at Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University and the curator of Drift: Art and Dark Matter.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and Professor at UBC’s Social Justice Institute-GRSJ and Adjunct Professor at Monash University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her artistic works include the films with Arjuna Neuman and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (Sao Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMA (New York). She has written for publications from Liverpool Biennale, 2017; Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14 and published in journals such as Canadian Art, Frieze, Pass, Texte Zur Kunst and e-flux. She has held visiting professorships at major universities in Australia, Brazil, Britain, Denmark, Germany and the United States and is a member of the collective EhChO.org and an editor of Third Text.
Nadia Lichtig is an artist currently living in the South of France. In her multilayered work, voice is transposed into various media including painting, print, sculpture, photography, performance, soundscape and song—each medium approached not as a field to be mastered, but as a source of possibilities to question our ability to decipher the present. Visual and aural aspects entangle in her performances. Lichtig studied linguistics at the LMU Munich in Germany and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France with Jean-Luc Vilmouth, where she graduated with honours in 2001, before assisting Mike Kelley in Los Angeles the same year. She taught at the Shrishti School of Art and Technology, Bangalore, India as a visiting professor in 2006, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Valence in 2007 and is professor of Fine Arts at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts of Montpellier (MOCO-ESBA), France since 2009. She has collaborated with musicians who are also visual artists, such as Bertrand Georges (Audible), Christian Bouyjou (Popopfalse), Nicolu (La Chatte), Nina Canal (Ut) and Michael Moorley (The dead C). Lichtig worked and works under several group names and pseudonyms (until 2009: EchoparK, Falseparklocation, Skrietch, Ghosttrap and Nanana).
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He is an artist, filmmaker and writer. With recent presentations at CCA Glasgow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manifesta 10, Marseille; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Forum Expanded, Berlin Berlinale; Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; Berlin Biennial 10, Germany; Serpentine, London X Qalandia Biennial, Palestine; Gasworks, London; Bold Tendencies, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT and Docslisboa, Portugal; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; Industry of Light, London; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art, Seoul amongst others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux.
Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz (FR), and currently lives and works in Paris. Ntjam is part of a generation of artists who grew up with the internet, communicating and sending images by electromagnetic wave. Working with video, text, installation, performance and photomontage, Ntjam creates a story with every piece that acts as a reflection of the world around her. Drawing connections to science fiction and the cosmos, Ntjam has said of her work, “I sat there some time ago with Sun Ra in his Spaceship experimenting with a series of alternative stories. An exoteric syncretism with which I travel as a vessel in perpetual motion.” Ntjam studied in Amiens and Dakar (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges (FR) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy (FR). Her works and performance have been shown at numerous venues such as the 15th Biennial of Lyon, DOC! Paris, a la Zentral (CH), Palais de Tokyo, Beton Salon, La Cite internationale des arts, la Bienanale de Dakar (SN), Let Us Rflect Festival (FR), FRAC de Caen, and CAC Bretigny.
Anne Riley is a multidisciplinary artist living as an uninvited Slavey Dene/German guest from Fort Nelson First Nation on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Her work explores different ways of being and becoming, touch and Indigeneity. Riley received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012 and has exhibited across the United States and Canada. From 2018 to 2020, she worked on a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver with her collaborator, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss. Riley and Wyss’s project, A Constellation of Remediation, consisted of Indigenous remediation gardens planted throughout the city. Riley and Wyss were longlisted for the 2021 Sobey Art Award. Since this project, Riley participated in the Drift: Art and Dark Matter residency and exhibition, creating works that consider the possibilities of making and being beyond the confines of Western institutions and extractive processes.
Jol Thoms is a Canadian-born, European-based artist, author and sound designer. Both his written and moving-image work engage posthumanism, feminist science studies, general ecology and the environmental implications of pervasive technical/sensing devices. In the fields of neutrino and dark matter physics he collaborates with renowned physics institutes around the world. These “laboratory-landscapes” are the focus of his practice led PhD at the University of Westminster. In 2017 Thoms was a fellow of Schloss Solitude and resident artist at the Bosch Campus for Research and Advanced Engineering. Thoms graduated with an Honours BA in Philosophy, Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and later studied under Simon Starling at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2013). Between 2014 and 2016 he developed and taught an experimental creative-research program for architecture students at the University of Braunschweig with then interim director Tomás Saraceno. In 2016 Thoms won the MERU Art*Science Award for his film G24|0vßß, which was installed in the Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art group exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Thoms is a lecturer in the MA Art and Ecology program at Goldsmiths University, London.
Drift: Art and Dark Matter is a residency and exhibition project generated by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB. Four artists of national and international stature were invited to make new work while engaging with physicists, chemists and engineers contributing to the search for dark matter at SNOLAB’s facility in Sudbury, two kilometres below the surface of the Earth.
[more]Please join us for the opening of Drift: Art and Dark Matter with a performance-conversation by artists Denise Ferreira da Silva and Jol Thoms. Ferreira da Silva and Thoms will touch on intersections between Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and n-Land (2021), both of which will play throughout the evening on the Belkin Screen.
[more]The long search for dark matter has put the spotlight on the limitations of human knowledge and technological capability. Confronted with the shortcomings of our established modes of detecting, diagnosing and testing, the search beckons the creation of new ways of learning and knowing. Fusing the praxes of arts and science in the emergent fields of interdisciplinary research, Ars Scientia, a tripartite partnership between UBC's Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (Blusson QMI), the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Belkin, presents an opportunity to foster new modes of knowledge exchange across the arts, sciences and their pedagogies. Funded by UBC’s Research Excellence Cluster program, Ars Scientia will conduct rich programming and research to address this line of inquiry over the next two years beginning in 2021.
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