the excess is ritual

Guest curated by Noor Bhangu

This exhibition runs January 21- April 4, 2023 at Dunlop Art Gallery (Central Gallery)

With Damien Ajavon, Darcie Bernhardt & Carmel Farahbakhsh, Anna Binta Diallo, Sahar Jamili, and Dan Taulapapa McMullin.

Image credit: Anna Binta Diallo, The Charmer, from The Wanderings series, digital collage printed on Phototex adhesive fabric, 2021.

Exhibition description:
the excess is ritual returns to histories of excess from a pluralistic range of positions and experiences, to generate new readings and relations within queer contemporary art. It features artists and thinkers who draw on the repertoire of rituals, which have become marginalized and silenced through colonial and homocolonial history. Using the metaphor of excess, this exhibition hopes to visualize all that has been lost and all that can be recovered.

Artist projects centre aesthetics of queer life, queer history, and cross-cultural relation, as they are brought together to confront Western fantasies of progress and order. Under the curatorial umbrella of queer and relational, works will comment on the afterlife of racism in diaspora, the imagined intimacies of ancestors, and the survivance of non-binary identities through the histories of settler colonialism. Moving across specific contexts and questions, we consider what it means to centre queer and relational practices, pleasures, and desires in art.

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice is rooted in relational curatorial aesthetics and practices. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories of representation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.

She is a co-curator for Window Winnipeg (CA), a 24-hour art space for site-responsive presentations of contemporary art, with Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Jennifer Smith. Her independent curatorial projects have shown in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, and Norway.

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