Dates:

March 1, 2020 – June 26, 2021

In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality is a year-long project exploring practices of relationality in art contexts led by special projects curator Toby Lawrence.
 
Within the spaces of the curatorial, how are we in relation? Considering the social, political and territorial complexities across North America, curatorial hospitality supports reciprocal, multi-directional guest-host relations in unceded and Treaty lands. Throughout 2020/21, project curator Toby Lawrence will work in collaboration with Open Space to explore the role of curatorial hospitality responsive to the gallery, the surrounding communities and the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ territories within which the gallery operates. An expansion of her ongoing collaborations and her research during a creative residency at the Comox Valley Art Gallery in 2019, this developing research looks deeply at vital and variable tenants of curation—power, expectations, protocols, boundaries, and support—and is framed through the question of how we come together through our differences. Over the course of the year, this project will be activated through a program of activities, including the In Relation limited series podcast and The Earth is my Elder exhibition.

In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality is supported by the Victoria Foundation Community Grant.

Associated Programming

Exhibition

In The Earth is my Elder, New Mexico-based artist, poet and earth alchemist Krista Arias explores the complexities of reconnecting to ancestral homelands through body-as-earth connections.

The gallery installation is not the beginning nor the end point, but, instead, a vessel in the present moment that holds and supports the three video-poems by Krista Arias. A place to visit over the course of the exhibition, to view again and to think through the ways these ideas expand and contract, signalling the variability of guest-host relations in many contexts and forms. The exterior, street-front installation offers magnified views of Krista’s poetry through the separation of the audio, video, and textual elements that form the video-poems. Installing the work outside of the gallery accommodates the ever-changing social restrictions due to covid-19 and offers an experience of the works for those passing by and for those who are not able or inclined to enter the gallery space for countless reasons. Parallel programming, including a Virtual Reading by Krista of poetry from her 2021 compilation, Xingona Girl Smoke, and the In Relation podcast series, presents further opportunities to engage with conversations around hospitality and guest-host relations and to cycle back to and reconsider the ideas presented throughout The Earth is my Elder.

Collaborations between Toby, Krista and Lindsay Harris through the Bread, Flesh & Ink activist potlucks is ultimately where the research for In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality began—with the question: What is curatorial hospitality? Toby’s research initially endeavoured to define curatorial hospitality; however, it was quickly made clear that its terms are ever changing. Even still, this focused inquiry has opened up space for deep thinking through visitation as a methodology and for dialogue around curatorial responsibility and guest-host relations within public art gallery spaces. For Toby, the presentation of The Earth is My Elder at Open Space closes the circle on this period of in-depth research around curatorial hospitality, but does not arrest the conversations between co-conspirators, interlocutors and collaborators that has become foundational to interrogating methods of working in relation, in search of more harmonious and equitable practices.