Emelie Chhangur (1977) is an artist, curator and writer based in Toronto, where she works as the Assistant Director/Curator of the Art Gallery of York University. Over the past decade, she has developed an experimental curatorial practice in collaboration with artists. Recent projects include The Awakening a three-year multi-faceted participatoryperformance with Panamanian artist Humberto Vélez, no.it is opposition., an exhibition and two-year collaboration with Brazilian artist-curator Carla Zaccagnini, Imaginary Homelands, a three-year residency project and exhibition featuring the work of nine Colombian artists, and the Centre for Incidental Activisms (CIA), a radical proposition of gallery “in-reach,” where participatory, activist, and research-based practices were emphasized over conventional methods of exhibition display. Her upcoming collaboration with Trinidadian artist Marlon Griffith will be a large-scale public street procession programmed in conjunction with the Parapan Am Games (2015). Chhangur is interested in how exhibitions and texts perform to create unique interpretative experiences as well as in finding ways to enact activisms from withinan institutional framework. Chhangur believes that galleries should serve a social function and is committed to participatory forms of contemporary art production through collaboration. In 2005, she founded the AGYU’s residency program, which is targeted at the creation of long-term projects that engage with communities and under-represented forms of artistic production that use art as a social and political tool.

Project Description:

Mas Movement (working title) celebrates the participatory and performative forms of colonial cultural resistance in the Americas that incorporate dance, music, sport, and “narrative” performance (i.e. story telling with movement)—for example Native-Canadian powwow dancing, Canadian spoken word, Brazilian Capoeira, and Caribbean Carnival, among many others to be researched. It is a long-term, multi-faceted, collaborative project that brings together these diverse forms and practices in a single, culminating, trans-cultural street procession for the opening ceremonies of the Para Pan America Games scheduled for summer 2015 in Toronto. Using the structure of Para-Sport (especially as it pertains to more than one person working together) and the strategies of the cultural forms themselves (i.e. participative, collaborative, happening in the streets, with live music, engaging audiences, etc.), the culminating performance symbolically stages the coming together, sharing, and passing off of the traditions of movement, mixing, resistance, play, and ritual that informs cultural expression throughout the Americas and which particularly manifests itself in hybrid forms within the trans-cultural context of Toronto. With Parapan Am games as our inspiration, this project looks at how people move differently through the city and how individuals and collectives navigate their social and cultural spaces and overcome barriers—be they social, mental, economic, physical, etc.

Through this project, I propose to conduct research into how one can extend the role of non-art people into contemporary art practices and curatorial processes and how one can combine traditional and popular arts with current pedagogical/participatory contemporary art practices. At the very heart of my proposal is the fundamental questioning of how one conducts curatorial research and how the type of research inflects the nature of my practice. I am interested in developing projects across cultures and disciplines by expanding the methodological scope of this research to include individuals not considered part of the so-called art-frame and opening up curatorial practice to cultural processes that are kept outside mainstream art production as a form of research-creation-enactment. I am interested in exploring the very processes of how one learns about culture, socio-political contexts, and modes of artistic production across the Americas through participation in/along-side them.

By working in collaboration with individuals and groups to develop new kinds of choreographies of resistance (i.e. through the various sports/cultural groups I work with for this project), I wish to collectively explore: (1) How have past performative forms of colonial cultural resistance developed in the Americas evolved today? (2) What does that mean for developing new performance methodologies of solidarity in the context of a culturally mixed Toronto, and 3) How can we play within the margins that have defined a collective culture of resistance in the Americas using mimesis, defiance, and syncretism to develop new, collective forms of performative strategies of resistance that balance the needs of individuals and specific groups with the collective nature of the project itself.

Through our collective curatorial activities, the project aims to create a moment of ephemeral magic through a durational performance that is built upon and through collaboration, learning, skill development, and making art. This project is designed to empower people, to produce a tangible community spirit, and provide an opportunity for collective, cross-cultural and disciplinary action while simultaneously contributing to the evolving discourses around participatory and socially engaged art practices.

This project is designed to be an exchange of cultural traditions and their subsequent forms of “movement” that shows Torontonians who we are as a city of cultures mixing. The project engages a critical mass of people bringing back the democratic space of agency of “public space,” a kind of reclaiming of Toronto through bodily movement, cultural activity, and community purpose.

I would like to use this working group as a way to think through the methodologies of production, the ways in which I can better “perform” the themes, concepts, and intentions of this project through finding different collaborative and choreographic approaches to the creation of Mas Movement, and to explore in more detail and in consultation with other working group participants how to best situate a collaborative curatorial/choreographic methodology that is ethical, non-hierarchical, and process-based. I would also like to test possible ways in which to “mount” and exhibition of this performance that maintains its original performative spirit and creates an analogously performative experience for the viewer in the static space of the art gallery once de-linked from the liveness of the event.