Curator Tour with Su-Ying Lee: Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour
Saturday 21 September 1-2 PM.
Join curator Su-Ying Lee for a talk and tour about her fall 2024 exhibition, Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour.
Carl Beam, David Blandy, Andrea Chung, Minerva Cuevas, Aria Dean, Inyang Essien, Andil Gosine, Deborah Jack, Dinh Q. Lê, Candice Lin, Daniela Ortiz, Chanell Stone, Hank Willis Thomas, Jeff Thomas, Bo Wang & Lu Pan, Carrie Mae Weems, Connie Zheng
Constellations are groups of stars that form conspicuous patterns. In the exhibition’s title, Constellations is a metaphor for early European colonialism’s configuration of racialization, with land and labour. The project of early European colonialism depended upon the invention and inscription of racial categories to justify its methods— non-Europeans being conceived of as lesser humans. Beginning in Africa, European colonialism set off extractive practices, changing the physical landscape of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Racialization was instrumental in enslavement and indenture cementing anti-Black and other forms of racism. The material and social conditions created by this pattern continues today. Artists’ works in Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour look at the connected nature of racemaking through a series of thematic areas. Not leaving trauma and the sum of this history to inscribe identity, artists’ explorations of themes also powerfully express self-definition, reclamation, agency, and beauty.
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.