Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour
Esker Foundation, Canada
Curated by Su-Ying Lee
September 21-December 15, 2024
Opening Saturday 20 September, 6-9pm
Carl Beam, David Blandy, Andrea Chung, Minerva Cuevas, Aria Dean, Inyang Essien, Andil Gosine, Deborah Jack, Dinh Q. Le, Candice Lin, Daniela Ortiz, Chanell Stone, Hank Willis Thomas, Jeff Thomas, Bo Wang & Pan Lu, Carrie Mae Weems, Connie Zheng
Images: Gathering Storm: The Archive, David Blandy, 2024; A new card edition and installation, supported by Esker Foundation
Gathering Storm was originally developed by David Blandy as a UK associate at the Delfina Foundation for The Politics of Food residency programme, with the partnership of Gaia Art Foundation.
Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour begins with the flows of people and plants circulated through the routes of early European colonialism. Plants, which were valuable as food, medicine and for other industries were a key driver for colonial exploration and occupation. Ethnobotanical knowledge, expertise, and labour were extracted from racialized peoples, activities that settlers carried out in tandem with the disturbance of land. In real and symbolic terms, a deep enmeshment exists between the disturbance of land, and the disruption and exploitation of transported human lives.
Today, numerous aspects of our day-to-day lives, as wide ranging as access to health care and the continuing success of insurance companies, continue to be linked to structures invented or instrumentalized to limit the freedoms of racialized people in favour of colonial capitalism. Under the long shadows of racial and plantation capitalism and unfreedom, how do we conceive of racial identity? How can racialized people relate to place, land and nature under this legacy of trafficking, forced labour and displacement? Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour brings together work by artists who look at the connected nature of race-making, colonialism, and land.
Su-Ying Lee is an independent curator and has also worked in institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (University of Toronto). Recent exhibitions include Amy Ching-Yan Lam with HaeAhn Woo Kwon: A small but comfy house and maybe a dog at Richmond Art Gallery (2023) and Overseeding: Botany, Cultural Knowledge and Attribution at the Blackwood Gallery (2024). Her projects have taken place across Canada, in Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Quezon City (Metro Manila, Philippines). She writes creative non-fiction and social criticism.