This is part of the Art Museum’s ongoing series of Virtual Spotlights centred on our collections, exhibitions, and projects.  This Spotlight complements the exhibition Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents, on view at the Jackman Humanities Institute from September 11, 2024 to June 20, 2025. Curated by Yantong Li, the exhibition is presented by the Art Museum in conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2024–25 research theme Undergrounds/Underworlds. Click here for details on how to visit the exhibition.

Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents posits the underground as a rhizomatic common to consider imperceptible nexuses within a fractured land of colonial extraction. The exhibition projects the Anthropocene as a manifestation of colonial afterlife, in which the earth is transformed as a praxis for colonial materialism, informing unique geosocial arrangements, focusing on forms of social geologies mediated by extractive regimes and their built environments.  

Scattered across the Jackman Humanities Institute are Sanaz Sohrabi’s Future Relics (2021–ongoing), a series of archival re-assemblages of photographs from the British Petroleum (BP) Archive, pertaining to the British colonial oil operation in Iran. Moving beyond oil’s first degree of indexicality – pipelines, oil spills, and oil derricks – Sohrabi unveils an alternative image-world of oil by shifting the viewer’s attention onto the less-familiar sites, such as an oil refinery’s laundry rooms, an acrobatic team at the Abadan refinery, swimming pools and diving boards, surgery rooms, and recreational sports. In a way, Future Relics offers a kind of ethnography of oil, moving beyond the preconceived architectures of colonial extraction into a more spectral and social realm that enabled the manifestation of its petro-utopia.

Beichen Zhang’s The sun rises, the Great Northern Telegraph Station sinks into the sea (2022) probes the extractive foundations of modern infrastructure by examining the entanglement between China’s tele-modernity with inter-imperial forces. From the rubber prints to archival materials assembled nearby, there emerges colonial verandas, sites of undersea voyages, and tropical forests, accompanying a transmission signal on the CRT television that slowly gives shape to a set of colonial remnants that have laid the foundation of the early telegraph system on the coast of the island of Kulangsu. Zhang’s work attempts an intersectional dialogue amidst national modernities and colonial permeation, tunning the images of colonial infrastructure into sites of (mis)translation and appropriation.

The attritional harm enacted through practices of extraction exists at the peripheries of different regional histories. Alvin Luong’s A Voluminous Crush (2021–2022) posits the vertical architecture of a failed real estate plan as a site of speculative storytelling, where swamps of water spinach slowly creep into the land due to sea level rise. Hole Story (2019–2023), is then situated within this mirage of the unrealized future city, in which Luong repurposed the remnant skeletons from the real estate bubble as portals to a voluminous past.  In Phong Phú, Bình Chánh District in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the exposed sewers left from the real estate development plan are re-imagined as guerilla tunnels used by communist soldiers during the Vietnam War, unearthing a speculative story of the region appropriate but not factual, delineating a nonlinear reading of its histories that tangles dialogues of imperialism, war, nation-state ideologies and climate change. 

Lastly, through the venue’s window cells, the skyline merges with film stills by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko. The vinyl images, which are derived from the artists’ 16mm film Surface Rites (2021), show an atom monument at the entrance of Elliot Lake in Northern Ontario. The monument serves as a break between chapters in the film, whilst acting as a distant counterpart of the Holstein Cow sculpture in Cathedraltown that also appears in the film, linking sites of resource extraction, land use, the farming industry and the uncanny contest for identity that emerges from the exteriors of the uranium mining industry. When gazing through the windows, the audience is invited to take a momentary pause and reflect not just on the extractive industry in a distance, but the very land we are standing above, and the practices of extraction that continues to shake its foundation. 

Whether it is the remnants of the petro-utopia within British controlled oil operations in Iran, or inter-imperiality embedded within the tele-modernities in South China Sea; a war-torn Phong Phú with prosperous visions of a future city, or the peculiar ethnography that emerge from the uranium mining industry in Northern Ontario, the localities of extractive regimes each occupy a fractured relation to land, informing a substratum of colonial passage of scant hauntology, with each fragment revealing a distinct geosocial configuration. Through the works of Sanaz Sohrabi, Beichen Zhang, Alvin Luong, and Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko, the underground is transformed into a site that collapses temporal and spatial distance, revealing the traces of extractive practices and the geophysical, geopolitical ramifications that continues to perpetuate our present social geologies.  

Credits

Banner Image: Beichen Zhang, The sun rises, the Great Northern Telegraphy Station sinks into the sea: Balcony and Frogs, 2022. Print on rubber, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

About

Yantong Li (b. 1998) is curator, researcher, and artist based in Toronto, Canada. He is an MVS Curatorial Studies candidate at the University of Toronto. Li works at the intersection of global infrastructure, geopolitics, regional folklore, and decolonization. His collaborative works and curatorial projects have been shown internationally at venues including the Curatorial Awards at Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival (Xiamen, China, 2022); Singapore International Photography Festival (Singapore, 2022); Durian-Durian: the First Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial, (Guangzhou, China, 2023); and The New Gallery (Canada, 2024).