In the Interstices: a conversation on memory and archives

A program of:
In the Interstices of Our Palms

Saturday, May 24
2pm–4pm

Locations:
University of Toronto Art Centre and Senior Common Room
University College, 15 King’s College Circle

Please register on Eventbrite.

Join us for an afternoon of musical performance and public discussion as part of the thesis exhibition In the Interstices of Our Palms, curated by MVS Curatorial Studies graduating student Sophie Dubeau Chicoine.   

In relation to Tanya Lukin Linklater’s installation Indigenous geometries (2019), Sassa Linklater will perform a musical score within the exhibition space of the University of Toronto Art Centre. As singing echoes through the exhibition, participants will get a chance to experience the embodied nature of a collective (re)assembly.

Following the performance, visitors will be invited to the Senior Common Room for a public discussion exploring the power of memory and embodied archives in relation to various community efforts. This conversation will feature artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, performance and dance educator Seika Boye, food historian Salma Serry, and Indigenous literary scholar Johannah Bird.

This event is free and all are welcome. Registration is recommended. 

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Sassa Linklater is Omaskeko Ininiw from Moose Cree First Nation and Sugpiaq from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in Alaska. A multimedia artist, she beads, sews, paints on parfleche, and makes digital art. She is a powwow dancer and placed second in Teens Traditional category at Wikwemikoong Powwow in 2024. Sassa was crowned Miss Nipissing First Nation in 2023, and she sings at round dances, powwows, and ceremonies. Sassa has shown videos at All My Relations Arts, Minneapolis and Trinity Square Video, Toronto. She plans to attend university to become a Cree language teacher like her late nitaniskojaban (great-grandmother), Agnes Hunter.

Tanya Lukin Linklater‘s artistic practice spans video, sculpture, and dance. Her work is structured by sensation, embodied inquiry, scores, rehearsal, and being in relation (to ancestral belongings, communities, and weather). Through citation of Indigenous peoples’ lived experience and cultural work, she honours practices and lineages that exceed dominant ideas of who we are. In 2024, she undertook a post-doctoral fellowship in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago. She lives and works in Nbisiing Anishinaabeg territory in North Bay, Ontario. 

Seika Boye is a writer, scholar, educator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance, movement, Blackness, archives and museums, and embodied pedagogies. She is an Assistant Professor and Founder/Director of the Institute for Dance Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. From 2018 to 2019, she was an artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario where she created the ongoing project This Living Dancer, an archival simulation that explores self-determination and privacy in archiving methodologies. She is Co-Investigator and Co-Director of the research project Gatherings—Archival and Oral Histories, dedicated to the preservation and study of performance histories in Canada.

Salma Serry is a doctoral researcher and cultural worker specialized in the history of food in West Asia and Egypt. She is also the curator of @Sufra_archive, a digital archive project and social media platform dedicated to West Asian and North African food history and culture. Currently, Salma is working on a PhD in History at the University of Toronto with a specialization in Food Studies at the Culinaria Research Center. Salma is also part of Super Melon, a collective art project that aims to investigate the intersectionality of food and politics in occupied Palestine, bringing into view the overlooked aspects of everyday lived experience.

Johannah Bird is a member of Peguis First Nation, PhD candidate in English at McMaster University, and creative dabbler. Her research considers late 19th- and early 20th-century writing and oratory by Cree and Anishinaabe people and expressions of relationship to and with land and waters in the Prairies. Her research interests include archives, affect, life writing, poetry, and poetics. In 2024, her literary work was featured in the exhibition Gathering: Tanya Lukin Linklater at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University.