Notice Board

Art NOW series featuring Emelie Chhangur
March 3 | noon | University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

Curating at the Thresholds of Institutional Response-Ability
The social justice work I undertake at university museums operates at the threshold of their entangled social, civic, and pedagogical role. Over the past two decades, my commitment to the responsibility of this work has shifted and become more radicalized. I’ve gone from being a curator transforming the art institution from within through a practice I call in-reach, to becoming a director reimaging the art institution—from the ground up—toward other, polysemous futures, a process I am calling infra/structural activism. I have learned that the work of social justice, when practiced by a university museum, can model alternative institutional values that extend beyond the ephemerality of its programming commitments to its wider operations and, in fact, recreate the very materialities of its architectures. 
Emelie Chhangur joins us via zoom in the University Recital Hall for this lecture.

Emelie Chhangur is a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada, known for her process-based, participatory methodologies, the commissioning of complex artworks across all media, and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside gallery contexts. Dedicated to questioning the social and civic role of the public institutions of art, Chhangur has developed a curatorially-engaged approach to working across cultural, aesthetic, and social differences through a practice she calls “in-reach.” She’s curated over 150 exhibitions and special projects, produced over 25 publications, and won over 30 awards in curating, public programming, education, and writing, as well as in 2019, the OAAG’s inaugural BIPOC Changemaker Award and in 2020, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence.  She is currently Director/Curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, where she collaborates with the architectural practice of KPMB to envision new museum architectures through a community-engaged design process for Agnes Reimagined.

Image: Exterior Composition for Agnes Reimagined, showing the new curvilinear addition (left) in conversation with the heritage Etherington House (right). Rendering by Studio Sang courtesy of KPMB Architects.