Opening: Saturday, March 15, 2014, from 3 pm to 5 pm

Curator cheyanne turions’ year-long residency within SBC Gallery’s Focus Program on Sovereignty culminates in the exhibition A Problem So Big it Needs Other People, including participants Basil AlZeri, Daina Ashbee, Maggie Groat, Susan Hiller, Maria Hupfield, Tiziana La Melia, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser and Chelsea Vowel.

A Problem So Big it Needs Other People attempts to think through the ways that sovereignty manifests as processes of negotiation on the level of the subject—but not a subject sovereign in solitude; a subject sovereign through contact, intimacy and sociality. Negotiation implies reciprocity, all parties with vested interests, all parties subject to encounter, acknowledgment and compromise.

Shifting the place of sovereign embodiment from the nation state to the subject re-orients the projection of enactment, from governing internal components (as a nation state acts as law-maker and enforcer over its citizens) to governing external relationships between subjects. When the place of sovereign embodiment is shifted from the nation state to the sovereign subject, what is the corresponding achievement of sovereignty, and how does it crystallize what it means to be in relation?

turions offers up a provisional definition of sovereignty in the context of this exhibition: an oscillation between different ways of knowing; the recognition of other understandings as they rub up against one’s own; the act of holding a space for not-knowing. Sovereignty is the work of mediation in recognizing the irreducible sovereignty of another, like one’s own, and the corresponding legitimacy of another’s claims on one’s self.

cheyanne turions is an independent, Toronto-based curator and writer who holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia. Most recently she curated Other Electricities, which explores the possibility of using decolonial aesthetics to contextualize works within the Art Gallery of Windsor's collection (September 2013 - January 2014). Her writing has been published by Canadian Art, C Magazine, FUSE, Gallery TPW and the Western Front. In addition to her curatorial work and writing practice, she is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto), is part of the Editorial Advisory Committee at FUSE magazine and sits on the Board of Directors for Fillip magazine. She was the Shop Manager/Curator at Art Metropole in Toronto. 

SBC thanks Canada Arts Council for its’ support through the Aboriginal Curator for Residencies in the Visual Arts program.