The author of this post, Brittany Watson, was asked to curate an “imagined exhibition” as a component of Dr. Heather Igloliorte‘s undergraduate seminar Exhibiting Aboriginal Art in Theory and Practice, taught in the Department of Art History at Concordia University.

As an undergraduate student, I have found it easy to become disconnected from how my studies and research connect to a broader context beyond the classroom; in the Winter of 2013, however, Concordia’s Art History department offered an undergraduate seminar, Exhibiting Aboriginal Art in Theory and Practice, taught by Dr. Heather Igloliorte. To my delight, the course was not a survey of past and present exhibitions of Aboriginal art or artifacts; rather it required each student to curate an imagined exhibition. This exciting and overwhelming proposition may well have been one of the most important assignments of my undergraduate degree. The assignment led me to seek out and obtain two summer internships at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (the second starting this May), be involved in an on going project at the Whyte Museum related to my original project, and has inspired my MA research proposal. For the assignment I wanted to develop a project that did not simply call for research on a topic that culminated in a show created by me, but one that involved collaboration between a museum and an Aboriginal community.

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photograph by Christopher Conry/Visual AIDS

The author of this post, Mary Caple, is the Administrative Assistant at CEREV and was one of the co-organizers of “Collective Strategies for Visual Production on the Issue of HIV Criminalization.” This workshop took place in the CEREV Exhibition Lab in January 2014 and was led by New York-based artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein. The session was a co-production with Concordia’s HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series with the support of the university’s Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery. Participants spoke at the Visual AIDS event “Flash Collectives: Creating Agile Strategies for Social Change” on February 28, 2014 at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center in New York.

This February, CEREV hit the road to New York. A month after our extremely productive workshop with Avram Finkelstein, participants from that session took part in a round table discussion titled “Flash Collectives: Creating Agile Strategies for Social Change.” The Brooklyn Community Pride Center and Visual AIDS, a New York based contemporary arts organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness through art and assistance to artists living with HIV/AIDS, kindly invited myself, my co-organizer Ian Bradley-Perrin, and other workshop participants. The group, including CEREV research affiliate Jenny Doubt, discussed our experiences of organizing and working as a “flash collective” with Avram and a group of about thirty attendees.

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The author of this post, Jenny Doubt, is a CEREV fellow and was one of the participants in “Collective Strategies for Visual Production on the Issue of HIV Criminalization.” This workshop took place in the CEREV Exhibition Lab in January 2014 and was led by New York-based artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein. The session was a co-production with Concordia’s HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series with the support of the university’s Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery. Participants also spoke at the Visual AIDS event “Flash Collectives: Creating Agile Strategies for Social Change” on February 28, 2014 at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center in New York.

On 24 January 2014, CEREV hosted “Collective Strategies for Visual Production on the Issue of HIV Criminalization,” a one-day workshop facilitated by artist and AIDS activist Avram Finkelstein (Gran Fury, ACT-UP). The main goal of the workshop was for participants to ‘begin a conversation’ – with each other, and with a ‘general public’ – about the problems that have arisen as a result of the proliferation of criminal convictions around the non-disclosure of HIV in Canada, in which a person with a detectable viral load can be charged with sexual assault if they fail to disclose their HIV-positive status combined with the failure to use protection (ie a condom).[1]

The morning began with an initial brainstorming session to generate key words and themes related to HIV/AIDS and criminalization, an activity that revealed the group’s diversity of experiences and perspectives (see image above). We then had a ‘teach-in’ in order to establish a baseline for the participants to draw on in understanding issues relating to criminalization. While it is important to acknowledge cases of willful exposure to HIV, critiques of HIV criminalization include the fact that sentencing does not have an effect on sexual behavior, threatens to re-stigmatize the HIV-positive body as ‘toxic’ and dangerous and often does not consider whether actual transmission has taken place. Some sentences moreover risk reaffirming public ignorance around HIV transmission, including those based on spitting, which poses no significant threat of HIV transmission.[2] After a very brief lunch break, the group shifted from an educational approach to an activist operation, creating visual materials for awareness-raising purposes. Breaking into three smaller working clusters, two groups worked on producing images while one was responsible for generating text. By the end of the day we had created a tumblr website, flyers and buttons (both of which appear on the tumblr site) and an image that we projected in a public space.

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The author of this post, Marie Lamensch, is the Assistant to the Director at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) and co-facilitated a Twitter Boot Camp in our Exhibition Lab in January 2014.

As part of its plan to establish a Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab (DMAPLab), the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies organized a “Twitter Boot Camp for Human Rights” in CEREV’s Exhibition Lab on January 31. Attended by both students and professionals, the two-hour session focused on the basics of Twitter and the potential for this social media platform to be used for social good.

Since the emergence and rapid rise of social media, human rights institutions, activists and NGOs have realized that Twitter offers a wide range of possibilities to advance their causes., Twitter allows immediate connection with partners and wider audiences in order to mobilize efforts and share news. Furthermore, as a real-time system for monitoring events, Twitter can and has been used during crises to gather and share data in order to coordinate humanitarian responses, improve early warning systems or document human rights violations for eventual prosecution.

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The author of this post, Natalie Doonan, was one of the participants in “Breakfast, Lunch and a Doggy Bag: A Food Praxis Session,” a workshop in the CEREV Exhibition Lab in January 2014 led by Toronto-based Palestinian artist Basil AlZeri and David Szanto, Concordia Individualized Program PhD student and Vanier Scholar in performative gastronomy.

On January 23rd, I participated in “Breakfast, Lunch, and a Doggy Bag: A Food Praxis Session with Takeaways,” led by Toronto-based artist Basil AlZeri and food and performance scholar David Szanto in the CEREV Exhibition Lab. The takeaways were multiple: social connections, tasty treats, creative ideas and artistic references. Before the workshop even began, fellow participants referred me to the book Four Fish by Paul Greenberg, to performance artist Lynette Hunter and to the work of Sonja Zlatanova, who will be creating a menu inspired by major figures of feminism as part of an event celebrating La Centrale’s fortieth anniversary. The workshop was choreographed with great care, including its staging. The exhibition space was arranged with four tables to accommodate four sitters each. We were each asked to bring a food item. This was clearly a social space.

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Recently, CEREV volunteered its lab space, equipment, and technical expertise to host an online Google+ live Hangout and YouTube broadcast with the Montreal Institute of Genocide and Human Rights (MIGS).

As part of the Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab (DMAPLab), MIGS hosted an online panel discussion on the use of social media and other technologies to detect and prevent mass atrocity crimes. The panel titled “Using Tech to Fight Atrocities?” included speakers Christopher Tuckwood (The Sentinel Project), Akshaya Kumar (The Enough Project), Nathaniel Raymond (Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative), and was moderated by Kyle Matthews (MIGS).

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CEREV’s Acting Director Shelley Butler and Administrative Assistant Mary Caple recently attended a “master class” on Making Knowledge Public, led by Concordia public historian Ron Rudin, as part of Trudeau Foundation Week in Montreal. Below are their reflections.

How do scholars make research public? What audiences do we reach? Which ones could we reach better by working with other medias and writing styles? How do we measure the public impact of our work? What subjects lend themselves to public discourse, collaboration, and interaction? How do we assess risks and benefits of going public? These questions were at the heart of a “master class,” led by Concordia University public historian Ron Rudin on November 18th as part of Trudeau Foundation Week in Montreal.

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The author of this post, Lon Dubinsky, was one of the participants in “Generally dissatisfied with the museum: Reflective debate, radical transparency and trust in the museum in civil society,” a workshop in the CEREV Exhibition Lab in October 2013 led by museum writer, researcher and consultant Bernadette Lynch.

It is over a month since Bernadette Lynch’s workshop “Generally Dissatisfied with the Museum” at CEREV, yet her perspectives on museum theory and practice continue to resonate. She began the workshop by asking the participants to situate themselves along a “satisfaction spectrum” according to how they felt about the effectiveness of attempts by museums at public engagement. Most expressed dissatisfaction and this response became the starting point for Dr. Lynch’s account and analysis of her multifaceted and community driven-work in museums. She spoke about her experience with First Nations in Canada, of her time as a senior manager at the Manchester Museum, and about conducting a study for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in which she worked with 12 museums and their community partners across the UK to explore the impact of engagement programs and practices.

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The author of this post, Chantale Potié, was one of the participants in “Futures of the Ethnographic Museum,” a workshop in the CEREV Exhibition Lab in October 2013 led by Dr. James Clifford (University of California, Santa Cruz).

I was pleased to be able to participate in the intimate “Futures of the Ethnographic Museum” workshop led by prominent scholar James Clifford on October. It is rare to be able to engage with a figure as influential as Clifford in such a small group setting. Clifford presented a text based on a keynote lecture he delivered at the Pitt Rivers Museum earlier this summer, a famous museum known for its taxonomic exhibiting of anthropological artifacts. Clifford sought to question the present state of the ethnographic museum through two case studies: 1) The UBC Museum of Anthropology (now widely known as MOA) in Vancouver, and 2) the future Humboldt Forum currently being built in Berlin.

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The author of this blog post, Lizy Mostowski, is one of two Concordia University students who traveled to Poland this summer to assist with the Souvenir, Talisman, Toy exhibit project alongside Polish students.

Souvenir, Talisman, Toy opened just a few days before Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival—the two weeks in Krakow where the city is flooded with tourists, journalists, academics and artists who are all somehow associated with and interested in Jewishness. In the time that the exhibit was on, I found that I was waiting excitedly for conflict that never became visible within the walls of the museum itself. Before opening day, the Polish volunteers had expressed their anxieties about it—they were expecting infuriated visitors just as I was. To my disappointment, the conflict I wanted to confront face-to-face never surfaced at the exhibit, but instead it surfaced on the only day I was at home sick with a cold, at Erica Lehrer’s panel discussion.

The conflict that I am referring to and was waiting for was the clash of opinions—These figurines are anti-Semitic! and Don’t read so much into it! These figurines are an integral part of Polish folklore and culture! I was ready to see it up close, I was ready to witness it, I was ready to moderate it. (more…)