Panel Discussion: Release: Towards an unburdening

A program of:
Labour

Sunday, September 29
3pm–5:30pm
Innis Town Hall, Innis College
2 Sussex Ave

This conversation will delve into the powerful themes and artists showcased in Labour, an exhibition that includes text, film, and installation works of panelists Tanya Lukin Linklater, La Tanya S. Autry and Chantal Gibson, alongside Natalie Asumeng, Tony Cokes, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Martine Syms. Together, they will explore critical questions such as: What motivates our inclusion in institutional spaces? Who holds the right to tell our stories? How can we express justified rage against microaggressions and discrimination? And how can rest be wielded as a form of resistance?

Performances and Incantations

The panel will open with a sonic introduction by Michael Shand, Sekou Lumumba, and Richard Grossman and will conclude with a poetic outro by poetic writer, community organizer and cultural curator Bisharo Farah.

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

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About the Panelists

La Tanya S. Autry is an art historian, educator, curator, and writer, who believes in making cultural work liberatory praxis. She co-produced the global movement Museums Are Not Neutral and has created exhibitions and programming via institutions and independent projects.

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head-on, reimagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her altered texts, installations and graphic poetry collections bring a critical lens to the historical mis/representation Black womanhood across cultural media. She is the author of How She Read (2019) and with/holding (2021).

Ingrid Jones is an independent curator, creative director, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice critically examines marginalization and refusal, particularly the erasure of Black scholarship, the commodification of Blackness, and the unseen labor of BIPOC artists and cultural workers. Her notable exhibitions include Liberation in Four Movements (2024), Nostalgia Interrupted (2022), Wild Rose (2018), IDENTITY (2018), and Poor But Sexy: The Outtakes (2010). Jones has developed lectures and masterclasses for Sheridan College and Toronto Metropolitan University, focusing on photography, art direction, and the interplay between art movements and sociopolitical events. She has received the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award for research excellence and was nominated in 2023 for Exhibition of the Year over 20K by Galeries Ontario Galleries. Her collaborative work and writing have appeared in Globe Style, Computer Arts Projects UK, Vice Berlin, Waddington’s, and Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education.

Tanya Lukin Linklater undertakes embodied inquiry in rehearsal, performance, works for camera, installation, works on paper, and writing. Her recent exhibitions include Aichi Triennale, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Toronto Biennial of Art. Inner blades of grass (soft) (cured) (bruised by weather), including works from the last ten years and new commissions, was presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in summer 2024. Her Sugpiaq homelands are in southern Alaska. She lives in Nbisiing Anishnaabeg aki.

Lise Ragbir has dedicated her 20-year career to creating access to a range of art experiences. She has worked with corporate and public collections, non- and for-profit organizations, and organized exhibitions featuring artists Dawoud Bey, Genevieve Gaignard, Jacob Lawrence, and Deborah Roberts, among others. She is the co-editor of Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture (2020), and her essays about race, identity, immigration, and cultural representation have appeared in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Artnet, The Guardian, Time Magazine, USA Today, The Boston Globe and other publications. Lise is a graduate of Harvard University’s Museum Studies program.

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