Daniels Faculty students know Yaniya Lee as a visual studies lecturer and writer — but, for the past year, she has had an unusual side gig.

As a research resident at Vtape — a video archive founded in 1982 by Daniels Faculty professors emiriti Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak — Lee has spent the past few months sorting through hundreds of pieces of video art created over the past four decades. From that collection of films, she has curated "Fractured Horizon — A View From the Body," an online screening series that will continue throughout the months of June and July.

Each Friday between now and July 31, a new video in the series will be posted to Vtape's website. Once the videos are posted, they can be viewed free of charge, at any time. Many of them are rarities, seldom seen outside of art galleries.

Lee's video selections are united by a common theme: they all somehow reflect on the experience of belonging to a marginalized social group. All of them are by Black or Indigenous artists. Lee's aim was to select works from a number of different time periods.

"I was raised by Black feminist activists," Lee says. "Growing up, I heard about so many of the struggles for social justice. My intention when I was going into the archive was to somehow find an aesthetic trace of what the particular equity challenges were in different eras."

The first three videos in the series are already available on Vtape's website. One of them, titled Sum of the Parts, is a family history by artist Deanna Bowen (MVS 2008), a Daniels Faculty alumna. The other — Janine, by Cheryl Dunye — is a short, personal reflection on the artist's complicated relationship with a white high-school friend. A third video, by Indigenous artist Thirza Cuthand, was released on the Vtape website earlier today.

The screening series comes at what seems like an ideal moment. Because of the killing of George Floyd and the resulting global wave of protests, the voices of nonwhite people are being sought and highlighted with a new intensity. "As an arts worker, I've been seeing and experiencing a lot of really intense things in the past few weeks that make me quite angry," Lee says. "Sure, this screening series is relevant right now. But this has been my work for years. The fact that a boiling point has been reached doesn't mean racism is new."

At the conclusion of the screening series, on July 31, Lee will release a scholarly essay in which she summarizes findings from her research in Vtape's archives. Lee will also, on a date to be determined, participate in a livestreamed conversation about her research, with curator and educator Andrea Fatona.

To find out more about the Fractured Horizon screening series, or to view the videos, visit the Vtape website.

Top image: Still from Cheryl Dunye's Janine.

Afterall, an art journal published by Central Saint Martins in partnership with the Daniels Faculty and other institutions around the world, will launch its 49th issue on June 25. The launch party, which will consist of a talk by featured writer Hyunjin Kim on the work of Korean artist eun young jung, will take place on Zoom. Attendees are required to pre-register on Eventbrite.

The new issue, titled "Extractivism," examines topics related to extractive capitalism. The forward was written by Charles Stankievech, the director of the Daniels Faculty's Visual Studies program and a contributing editor at Afterall.

To purchase the full issue, or to browse past issues, visit the Afterall website.

Next week, as part of We Are One, a 10-day online film festival that will be taking place on YouTube, viewers will have an opportunity to watch Service of the Goods, a 2013 short film by Jean-Paul Kelly, a visual studies lecturer at Daniels.

Service of the Goods will be shown on the festival's YouTube channel on June 4th, starting at 9:45 a.m. EST. The 29-minute experimental short is a critical reimagining of the work of Frederick Wiseman, in which scenes from the legendary American director's documentaries play out in strange and surprising new ways.

In addition to Kelly's short, the We Are One festival will be showcasing numerous other films co-curated by programmers at 21 different film festivals around the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and Cannes. Kelly's short was selected by programmers from the New York Film Festival.

All of We Are One's films are free to watch, but viewers can make donations to support the World Health Organization and local relief partners during the COVID-19 crisis.

View the festival's full schedule here. And find more information on the festival's screening of Service of the Goods here.

Image: A still from Service of the Goods.

One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is that, for many people, every day feels the same as the last. With no friends around and no direct collaboration with work colleagues, it's easy to feel creatively exhausted.

That's partly why Daniels Faculty assistant professor Mitchell Akiyama created "Under the Dog Star," a new website that invites visitors to stretch their imaginations by quickly responding to creative writing prompts. (The name is a reference to a passage in The Rings of Saturn, a novel by W.G. Sebald.)

When a user loads Under the Dog Star in their web browser, they're presented with a creative writing prompt. It may ask them to transcribe a quote from an imaginary conversation, or to invent a voice for an inanimate object. Users are given only five minutes to write. After five minutes have passed, the website automatically sends them a new writing prompt.

Akiyama uses similar prompts in the classes he teaches as part of the Master of Visual Studies program at the Daniels Faculty. "These prompts are something I've been doing for a while now," he says. "The idea is to come up with prompts that make it very difficult to write in a standard voice. I want to get people to explore ways of expressing themselves that they would not usually have available to them."

All of a user's responses to Under the Dog Star's writing prompts are saved, anonymously, in a database. Once the website accumulates a large enough repository of writing, Akiyama hopes to analyze the text for patterns.

"The exercise is to make writing strange in a way that calls attention to what it is to write," Akiyama says. "On another level, this project is trying to do something similar with data collection and analysis. What kinds of representations of this material can you make that are interesting, and that speak to the very idea of data collection? What does doing an analysis on creative writing entail?"

Under the Dog Star's development was funded with a grant from the University of Toronto's School of Cities. Akiyama worked with Matthew Nish-Lapidus, a Master of Visual Studies student at the Daniels Faculty, to design the website.

Visit Under the Dog Star

Welcome to our new cohort of undergraduate students coming this fall. The Daniels Faculty has a long and distinguished 125-plus year history. There have been other times when we have had to cope with unpredictable circumstances. Our past and our present are replete with stories of our students, faculty, and staff rallying together for the greater good. Together with our faculty, undergraduate students in our Architectural Studies program have assembled some of those moments in the video above. You will also see previews of some of the exciting things you will be engaged in as a Daniels student.

We look forward to meeting everyone soon.

Jeannie Kim, Undergraduate Director, HBA Architectural Studies

Today is the 50th annual Earth Day, and there's good news and bad news. The good news: the earth's ecosystems are absorbing less manmade pollution than usual. The bad news: that's because people around the world are housebound as a result of COVID-19.

At the beginning of the winter 2020 semester, before the COVID-19 lockdown, students in the Daniels Faculty's Critical Curatorial Lab (a Visual Studies course that teaches curatorial and critical practice in visual and media arts) were already preparing for a world-altering crisis. Their group assignment was to create a manual for holding an art exhibition in a world in which life had been disrupted so thoroughly that electricity was no longer available.

Their "blackout" manual is now finished, just in time for a very weird Earth Day.

Download a PDF of the manual and read the class's press release below:

Download the "BLACKOUT" PDF

PRESS RELEASE: EARTH DAY X COVID-19 X BLACKOUT

From the beginning of the winter 2020 semester until the shutdown, students from the Critical Curatorial Lab (Daniels Faculty) were engaged in developing an exhibition format to be deployed in an emergency scenario. Conceived as pre-mediation for a moment when patterns of life are radically disrupted, their aim was to examine the affordance of art during a power blackout. Running throughout this thought experiment, radically reduced energy dependence and its possible culture was at issue. Addressing social relations, spectacle, and consumption, the project outcome was conceived as an emergency kit (exhibition) and instruction manual (catalogue) to be activated during a future power outage.

In light of COVID-19, only the second part of the project was realized. To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we are pleased to share this playful manual (featuring student essays, artworks, and archival material) in digital format. While ultimately consuming energy via U of T servers, we offer this document (as polemic) to the time of novel coronavirus. As the shutdown drives a dramatic reduction in energy demand, causing the largest ever drop in recorded CO2 emissions, this sudden change is also bringing instability to electrical grids worldwide. Blackouts may yet be a flow-on effect of this pandemic. However, beyond any outages, we propose the relevance of our speculative method for broader reflections on cultural life during our present crisis: Attempting to exhibit the critical moment in advance is a way to better handle its emergence in real-time. Curatorial pre-mediation is one bulwark against intercession by panic or shock doctrines, when everyday society and culture are up for grabs.

Visiting Professors Dr. Dehlia Hannah and Dr. Nadim Samman
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

Curators: Lilian Ho, Kaixin Li, Leona Liu, Jiaxin Mai, Olivia Musselwhite

Artists: Simon Fuh, Talia Goland, Eli Kerr, Seo Eun Kim, Matthew Nish-Lapidus, Yoko Ono

MVS Proseminar Winter 2020

Marguerite Humeau
Jan 21st
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr., 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Anne Carson: History of Skywriting
Feb 5th
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr.  7:30pm to 9:00pm

Yusuke Obuchi
March 3^rd
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr., 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Symposium: PROFIT and LOSS
(organized by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak)
March 6 and 7th
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr.

Filipa Ramos
March 17^th
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr., 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Rui Amaral
March 24^th
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr., 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Afterall Journal
March 31, Issue # 49 Launch
Main Hall, 1 Spadina Cr., 6:30pm to 8:00pm
April 4th, Workshop with international Afterall Editorial Team, Room 229 North Borden

Elizabeth Povinelli
April 9th Talk at SUGAR Contemporary
5 Lower Jarvis St. Toronto

Inaugural Visual Studies Researcher-in-Residence

We are pleased to announce the Researcher-in-Residency program for the Visual Studies program in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.  Each year an international guest will be in residency in the program as a visiting professor conducting their own research and engaging the students through teaching and graduate student mentorship.  For the inaugural session, philosopher of science Dehlia Hannah and curator Nadim Samman are hailing from Copenhagen and Berlin respectively.  They will be teaching courses on curating in the context of a “Blackout" and a graduate seminar on “The State of Nature (and its discontents).”  While in the city during the Winter term, they will be conducting studio visits with local artists and researching for a future exhibition. Together they will be writing the catalogue essays for the MVS Studio Thesis exhibition opening at the Art Museum April 17^th.

Dehlia Hannah, PhD, is a philosopher and curator, and Mads Øvlisen Fellow in Art and Natural Sciences at the Department of Chemistry and Biosciences at Aalborg University-Copenhagen. Her current research project, An Imaginary Museum of Philosophical Monsters, examines the role of fictional places, beings, and technologies in the history of philosophy. She holds a Doctorate in Philosophy and a Certificate in Feminist Inquiry from Columbia University, with specializations in philosophy of science and aesthetics. Her recent book, A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2018), reframes contemporary imaginaries of climate crisis by revisiting the literary and environmental aftermaths of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Her forthcoming monograph, Performative Experiments, examines contemporary artworks that take the form of scientific experiments. Her writing, teaching and curatorial practice broadly explore emerging environmental imaginaries and philosophies of nature. 

Nadim Samman is a curator and art historian based in Berlin. He read Philosophy at University College London before receiving his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He co-founded and curated the 1st Antarctic Biennale (Antarctica, 2017) and the Antarctic Pavilion (Venice Biennale of Art, 2015-). In 2016 he curated the 5th Moscow Biennale for Young Art, and in 2012 the 4th Marrakech Biennale (with Carson Chan). Other major projects include "Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition" (a unique site-specific exhibition on the remote Pacific island of Isla del Coco) and Rare Earth (at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna). Between 2012 and 2019 he co-directed the non-profit art space Import Projects, Berlin. In 2014 he was named among "100 Leading Global Thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and in 2016 among the "20 Most Influential Young Curators in Europe" by Art.sy.

The residency is made possible by generous support of the Dean’s Office.

As the year (and the decade) draws to a close, the Daniels Faculty is getting a few wins in under the wire. Now Magazine's list of the "best of Toronto's art scene" in 2019 includes a number of mentions of work by people connected to the Master of Visual Studies program.

Associate professor Charles Stankievech, the director of the MVS program, earned a nod for Best Film Program, as a result of his work on The Drowned World, a multimedia marathon at the Ontario Place Cinesphere, which he curated for the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Pegah Vaezi (MVS 2019), a student in the MVS Curatorial Studies program, was the organizer of "What do We Mean When We Say 'Content Moderation?'," which Now deemed 2019's Best Symposium. The event was funded by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

And 2019's Best New Art Space is SUGAR Contemporary, a waterfront gallery that is co-directed by Xenia Benivolski (MVS 2021), another Daniels graduate student.

When Master of Visual Studies curatorial student Yuluo Wei started thinking about the Jackman Humanities Institute's theme for the 2019 school year, "Strange Weather," it occurred to her that the strangest thing about the weather is how little we're forced to pay attention to it. "The way I wanted to approach it was to talk about the climate crisis," she says. "In modern, urban spaces, we have permanent climate control systems. We forget what's really happening outside. It's a kind of amnesia."

That was the genesis of the art exhibition she curated, "Weather Amnesia", which opened in mid-September in a space on the Jackman Institute's 10th floor.

The exhibition features a variety of artworks — some new, some selected from the University of Toronto's permanent collection, but all related in some way to notions of the environment and seasonal change.

Among the pieces on display is a sculpture of the Jackman Humanities building. It was milled out of a chunk of mass timber, an environmentally friendly wood construction material. Wei obtained samples of the wood through the University of Toronto's Mass Timber Institute, where Daniels Faculty researchers are studying ways of using mass timber in the construction of tall buildings. The sculpture was created by Master of Architecture student Fiona Lu:

This is Imago Humanus: shapes interacting during a Canadian Winter, by Rick McCarthy. "It's a collection of shapes in winter," Wei says. "It could be snowflakes, it could be snowstorms or anything you can imagine. This is the only abstract piece in the whole exhibition."

These 3D-printed flowers are by Tania Kitchell. "They're based on the real floral species, but the artist manipulated the ratios," Wei says. "The heads are bigger than the real ones. And they're all white because the artist really wants the audience to focus on the form, and to reimagine what's going on outside."

This piece, titled Birches, Rockcliffe, is a 1922 oil painting by the Scottish-Canadian artist Graham Noble Norwell.

"Weather Amnesia" will remain on view until June 26, 2020 at the Jackman Humanities Institute (170 St. George Street). For more details, and for hours, visit the exhibition's webpage.

Top photograph: Yuluo Wei in front of "Watching, Dull Edges," by Lisa Hirmer. All photographs by Barry Roden.