Free Palestine: An Anti-Imperialist Reading Room
© Kosisochukwu Nnebe, 2023. Credit: Guy L’Heureux.
Free Palestine: An Anti-Imperialist Reading Room
Saturday October 21, 2023 — 12 to 5 PM
The reading room open day and conversation between Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Sarah Nesbitt has been reimagined in light of the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. Framed by Nnebe’s exhibition I want you to know that I am hiding something from you / since what I might be is uncontainable, we are shifting the focus of the previously planned programming from reflections directly related to themes of the exhibition to center current and urgent political struggles for freedom in Palestine.
Acknowledging, as Rashid Khalidi does, that “what happens in the hostile space of the United States, of Europe and the white settler colonies, matters enormously”, we call on our community to gather in anti-imperial solidarity and resistance.
From 12 - 5 PM, articule will be open and transformed into an active site of contemplation, learning and sharing resources. Through reading critical anti-imperial texts as well as analysis and historical reflections on the current state of Palestine, this event offers an opportunity to reflect on how you may stand in solidarity with Palestinian people while understanding the need to resist and confront the broader forces of Western imperialism that perpetuate Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and genocide of the Palestinian people.
Please bring any books or resources that have rooted you in the struggle for liberation. Bring cardboard for poster making. Bring essays and articles for printing. Bring the words that remind you of the inextricable connection between the settler colony on which we stand and Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Bring the words that remind you of global capitalism’s attempts to absorb you into its project. Bring the words that compel you to resist.
This is a low-pressure gathering with the sole focus of supporting the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation and encouraging us all to dismantle the forces of imperialism that perpetuate theft, dispossession, apartheid and violence around the world.
The artist would like to acknowledge the support of nènè myriam konaté and the team at articule for their ideation, conceptual and material support.
What to expect:
Space to read and reflect
Space to discuss and share information
Tea and snacks
What to expect:
Your own reading or listening materials (clearly marked with your name)
Materials for sign making (cardboard/poster paper etc)
Laptops if you want (BYOL, though there will be printed materials and the possibility to have materials printed on site). Charging stations will be available at all times during the session. Disengaging from screens is encouraged!
Masks must be worn in the gallery at all times.
Please contact outreach@articule.org for more information.
© Kosisochukwu Nnebe, 2023
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist. Inspired by postcolonial theorists Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Nnebe’s practice is invested in unraveling the process of racialization and re-thinking the politics of Black visibility. Moving across installation and lens-based media, Nnebe creates works that shapeshift and transform to reveal a glimpse into new ways of seeing and understanding Blackness. In their play with spatiality and coded visual lexicons, Nnebe’s works root themselves also in Black feminist standpoint theory to demonstrate how one’s positionality within society - as within space - dictates what is seen and unseen, thus engaging viewers on issues both personal and structural in ways that bring awareness to their own complicity. Undergirding Nnebe’s practice is a desire for reconnection and dreams of otherwise Black futurities anchored in non-Western epistemologies and ontologies and anti-colonial solidarities.
Her work has been exhibited across Canada, including Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa/Hull, Kingston, Guelph, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Montreal, as well as internationally. Nnebe’s work can be found in public collections, including the Canada Council for the Art’s Art Bank and the Ottawa Art Gallery collection, as well as private collections in Canada, the United States and Nigeria, and she has been commissioned for both public and digital art projects by Plug In ICA and the Mozilla Foundation. Nnebe has spoken about her artistic work and research across the country and was an instructor of Art and Criticism at the Ottawa School of Art.
© Sarah Nesbitt, 2023
Sarah Nesbitt is a writer, curator and cultural worker based in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal. From 2018-2021 she was co-curator of window winnipeg, a 24-hour project space, and from 2016-2018, at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art on Treaty 1 territory. Select curatorial projects include: truths that remain, (2023); Walter Scott, Blinky Is Reading, (2017), and two major international group exhibitions co-curated with Jenifer Papararo: Entering the Landscape (2017), and Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs (2018). Her writing has been published in national and international publications.
© Mallory Lowe Mpoka, 2019
nènè myriam konaté is a child of Ayiti and Mali’s diasporas living in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their transdisciplinary practice is concerned with somatic knowledge(s) and storytelling. nènè is the founder of the Clap Back and author of Somatic Semantics.
If everything we want is on the other side of fear, nènè’s practice delves into the discomfort we experience when moving through fear — toward desire. Through dialogue-based interventions, they invite us to consider incongruities between the futurities we seek in order to shatter illusions of harmony and hold space for divergence.
nènè’s writing has appeared in Les Corps du Texte and Urgency Reader. They have led workshops, developed curatorial projects and created text-based works for the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, articule, Never Apart and AKA Artist Run Centre. They have also completed residencies at Ada X, Artexte and SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art.
I want you to know that I am hiding something from you /
since what I might be is uncontainable
September 15, 2023 - October 28, 2023
Opening September 15, 6 PM