Virtual Gallery Hop

ONLINE ON ZOOM | Mar 5, 2pm – 3:30pm | FREE

Join us for a virtual gallery hop! Participants will join a guided visit of both Intricacies of the Gaze — an exhibition at Riverdale Hub featuring the work of Khadijah Morley and eva birhanu, and Chase — an exhibition of work by Jagdeep Raina at the Textile Museum of Canada. In both exhibitions, the engaged artists work to deconstruct rigid understandings of diasporic and racialized experiences.

The tours will be held as part of one virtual event, led by Textile Museum of Canada’s Education Coordinator Yahn Nemirovsky and Riverdale Hub’s Curator of Exhibitions and Programs Ignazio Nicastro.

Intricacies of the Gaze

As an invitation to introspection, Intricacies of the Gaze explores and preserves two perspectives of Black womanhood. Together, eva birhanu and Khadijah Morley use their practices to expand on their diasporic experiences to engage with the multiplicity of Blackness through a transfusion of textiles and print media. Here the two artists present work that contends with the duality of their self-perception: how the world views them and how they view themselves.

As viewers move from one artist to the next, they will note how both birhanu and Morley narrate the elements of their identity that are both constructed and critiqued by the gazes of the world around them. It visually speaks to the act of watching while being watched. Through iconography and illustrative narratives of racial identity, Intricacies of the Gaze utilizes the synergy of birhanu and Morley to construct a space that allows for conversation on Black womanhood and acts as an extension to ideologies well known to Black and Black biracial women.

Jagdeep Raina: Chase

Featuring the work of Jagdeep Raina, Chase is a poetic exploration of the interplay of memory and migration, and of how both are mapped onto everyday landscapes. Raised and currently based in Guelph, Raina shares stories of the Sikh diaspora, drawing upon personal records and those of his family who were among the migration to southern Ontario in the 1960s, as well as oral and archival histories of wider pioneering Kashmiri and Punjabi Sikh diasporic communities. Rendering these narratives cinematically as embroidered tapestries as well as works on paper, Raina evokes the textured local and transnational geographies of longing and belonging that emerge in the quest to establish home in terrain that is unsettlingly remote.

Meet the Artists: