CENTO
Artists:
Vida Beyer
Nour Bishouty
Hazel Meyer
Philip Leonard Ocampo
Dana Qaddah
Curated by Dani Neira
Co-published with Moniker Press
Launch Date:
September 21, 2024 at Small Press Fest
cento (noun)
a piece of writing, especially a poem, composed wholly of quotations from the works of other authors.
anything composed of incongruous parts; conglomeration.
Obsolete. a patchwork.
CENTO is a loose-leaf, interactive artist book that features artist editions including a functional fortune-teller, bookplates with performance prompts, gossipy booklets, shape-shifting forms, existential meditations, and curatorial musings.
Through its expanded book form, CENTO extends its namesakes’ literary tradition and embraces the language of patchwork as a reparative method. Piecing together personal, cultural, historical, and speculative fragments, the publication explores a non-linear gathering and layering of meaning.
Risograph printed, edition of 150.
Artists
Vida Beyer
Vida Beyer is an artist who blends the personal with an archive of artifacts, pictures and stories from popular and unpopular culture as a means to cultivate potential sites of recognition.
Philip Leonard Ocampo
Philip Leonard Ocampo is an artist and arts facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. Ocampo’s multidisciplinary practice involves painting, sculpture, writing and curatorial projects. Exploring worldbuilding, radical hope and speculative futures, Ocampo’s work embodies a curious cross between magic wonder and the nostalgic imaginary. Following the tangents, histories and canons of popular culture, Ocampo is interested in how unearthing cultural touchstones of past / current times may therefore serve as catalysts for broader conversations about lived experiences; personal, collective, diasporic, etc.
Nour Bishouty
Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing. Broadly concerned with gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy, her practice explores notions of permission and articulation in cultural narratives overwritten by dispossession and displacement.
Dana Qaddah
Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist & independent curator currently based on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish territory. Qaddah’s practice uses archives of personal & itinerant cultural knowledge to traverse themes of Arab futurism & storytelling, while reflecting on the condition of being abstracted from the destruction of one’s own sense of self & place.
Photo by @ntashhha
Hazel Meyer
Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Meyer’s work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender-outlaws, incontinent-queers—into a performative space that centres desire, queerness, and sweat.
