REAL BC IT HAPPENED is an exhibition and artist residency featuring Deion Squires-Rouse and Ajeuro Abala, curated by Christina Oyawale. Over the summer months, Christina, Deion, and Ajeuro collaborated in a workspace that provided them the space and resources to expand their research; creating an iterative exhibition that explores ideological frameworks around self-portraiture, perception, and what counts as “real”.

Deion and Ajeuro investigated their own practices through photographing each other and themselves, while working with Christina to fully explore conversations around the act of transformative justice in the arts; creating spaces for oneself rather than waiting to be accepted into institutional space. The importance of spaces for Black students to freely make work beyond the themes of the diaspora while centering peer-to-peer collaboration that garnered discussions around access in the arts.

Featuring the work of emerging Toronto-based photographers Tommy Calderon and Durga Rajah, Fixations: Thoughts on Time explores conceptions of time in relation to photography. Using darkroom techniques, both artists engage the ways in which time is related to constructing and preserving an image, physically, psychologically, and culturally.

Rajah's A Measure of Time: 3 Seconds (2020/2022) anticipates a future moment that will come to pass. Influenced by her experience in performance, in which she has learned about form, rhythm, presence, gesture, and affect, Rajah’s images trace the phenomenology of a body in motion. By leaving her analogue photographs chemically unfixed for controlled intervals, Rajah’s work anticipates its completion in the future. In its attempts to fix time, this project generates an archive of a forever-receding moment.

Calderon's investigative series entitled Dialectics explores how time is a force that changes the experience of self.. Using historical photographic processes, he questions how image making creates a sense of time within histories of meaning, acknowledging the refractive ability of an individual as an intuitive source of knowledge. In his work, Calderon explores the intersections of the real and imaginary, thereby navigating the cultural and social aspects of time as they relate to individual experience.

As I Live & Breathe (2022)
Featuring works by: Emkay Adjei-Manu, Bel Andrade, Atanas Bozdarov, Hannah Bullock, Breanne Jeethan and Tee Kundu⁠
May 27 – July 3, 2022⁠
Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, Canada

As I Live & Breathe exists at the intersection of crip culture aesthetics and reenvisioning accessibility in the gallery space. The exhibition reckons with how care has allowed these artists whose identities fall within Mad, disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent communities, to share their experiences and questions on their own terms. The artists engage with themes that link to sociopolitical systems that create collective barriers for the disabled community; the health industrial complex, mental health support, physical accessibility and socialized ableist attitudes. The exhibition prioritizes the significance of interdependence and communal sharing/storytelling as radical occupation of space.⁠

Image Credit: Alison Postma


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Theo Vandenhoff
Direction + Music Video Editor
“Heartache Is An Empty Room” Video (2020-2021)