April 24, 7-9 pm, Jackie Wang in conversation with cheyanne turions

 

Departing from Jackie Wang's text "Against Innocence; Race, Gender and the Politics of Safety," Wang and turions will engage the audience in a discussion about the precision of language. As Wang notes in her text, the “social, political, cultural and legal recognition [of Black people in North America] only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized and made unthreatening…[and that] using ‘innocence’ as the foundation to address anti-Black violence is an appeal to the white imaginary.” Collectively, we will attempt to map how language works to obscure and deflect systemic exercises of power, envisioning tactics to use language more precisely, in order to reveal and dismantle.

 

Those attending are encouraged to pre-read "Against Innocence," which can be downloaded from LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism here.

 

 

April 25, 11 am-5 pm, The Oblique Cut: A Writing Workshop

 

Participation in the workshop is limited. To register, please contact SBC Gallery at julia.smith@sbcgallery.ca 

 

Participation in the workshop is free.

 

"How can I explain it to you? I'll try. It's that I'm perceiving a crooked reality. See through an oblique cut. Only now have I sensed the oblique in life. I used to only see through straight and parallel cuts. I didn't notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other." —Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

 

Drawing on Clarice Lispector's Água Viva, Wang will lead a writing workshop that uses Lispector's idea of the oblique cut as a way of communally exploring the relationship between trauma, the written word, the fleshy body and something Wang calls "the trauma monster." Together, we will try to enact the cut that casts life as other.

 

 

Jackie Wang is a poet, musician and academic, and is the author of the zines On Being Hard Femme, Memoirs of a Queer Hapa, The Adventures of Loneberry and The Phallic Titty Manifesto. In her critical essays she writes about queer sexuality, race, gender, the politics of writing, mixed-race identity, prisons and police, the politics of safety and innocence, and revolutionary struggles. She blogs at Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns and she is currently working on a book or two.

cheyanne turions is an independent, Toronto-based curator and writer. Forthcoming writing projects include contributions to MAWA’s Desiring Change: Contemporary Canadian Feminist Art and Duane Linklater’s The Wood Land School Reader. She is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) and sits on the Board of Directors for Kunstverein Toronto and the Editorial Advisory Committee for C Magazine. She currently works with the Cities for People project and as a Curatorial Assistant the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. A selection of texts by cheyanne turions including More Precisely, currently featured in Talk Show, can be found here. 

Jackie Wang and cheyanne turions' events are presented as part of  Talk Show  and within SBC's spring workshop and speaker series, supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.