Selected Exhibitions

Texts, Talks & Events





Online essay: The Planetary Clouds of Michelle Lopez (2025)

in SHIFT SPACE 5.0. Edited by Cannach MacBride and Taraneh Fazeli
Shift Space 5 includes two parts: pieces about the artist fellows and fieldnotes on technology and art. The fieldnotes build upon earlier Shift Space issues, which focused on decolonial technological practices, the intersection of literary writing and tech, and artists as uniquely positioned observers of tech. Reading across both parts connects purposeful approaches to art and technology by artists nationally to a broader set of concerns.

Over time, Shift Space aims to expand its support of art writing in the eight cities Knight focuses on to parallel the fellowship’s support of artists. This issue is the first with a majority of the writers connected to these cities. We were excited by this approach since, in shared work beyond this context, we are dedicated to supporting writers doing place-based writing amidst the gravitational pull of major cities on art criticism and publishing. In pairing writers and artists, beyond shared geography, we considered other affinities like identity or research as well as art writing approaches that might offer something different from previously published writing on each artist. As a result, this cohort of writers embody a wide range of authorial positions and methodologies resulting in stylistically diverse texts. 
-Cannach MacBride and Taraneh Fazeli

Includes contributions by: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Cannach MacBride, DeForrest Brown Jr., Monica Uszerowicz, Rua M. Williams, Tamir Williams, Taraneh Fazeli, Tawana Petty

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Catalogue essay: Retreat and Reclaim: Kandis Williams’s Visions of the Black Body as a Contested Plot (2025)

Edited by Taylor Jasper
Kandis Williams: A Surface (2025), curated by Taylor Jasper, is a comprehensive survey of the artist-scholar’s career to date. Delving into her deeply researched practice, A Surface reorients the archive and reframes the politics of visibility, emerging with a vision of liberation.

Includes contributions by Cheryl I. Harris, Taylor Jasper, Mirreille Miller-Miller Young, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Mlondolozi Zondi

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Published interview: The Haunted ARC: A Conversation with Denise Ryner (2025)

Edited by Joshua Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore
The Employee (2025) is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers reflecting on the links between public funding, artistic commitment, and self-exploitation in their practices and labour contexts.

Includes contributions by the editors, Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, and Marina Vishmidt, with graphic design by House9.

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Curatorial essay: Beneath Our Feet (2022)

Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) edited by Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, Claire Tancons, Zairong Xiang
According to the writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, “we humans cannot pre-exist our origin myths any more than a bee can pre-exist its beehive.” Drawing inspiration from her seminal essays “The Ceremony Must Be Found” (1984) and “The Ceremony Found” (2015), Ceremony draws on Wynter’s thinking to suggest that “modernity,” contrary to its own self-image as rational and secular, is also determined by origin myths that emerged through the “mutations” of Christian cosmology after the dawn of capitalism in the Middle Ages. With over twenty-five unique contributions and commentaries on Wynter’s propositions from artists and writers, this publication will constitute a critical reference point for those seeking to construct and envisage a “counter-cosmogony” to the dispossession, slavery, and extractivism of modernity — which together endanges planetary life. 

Includes contributions by Mario Bellatin, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Esther Figueroa, Cécile Fromont, Patricia Reed, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Elena Vogman, u. a.

For more information or to purchase:
https://spectorbooks.com/book/ceremony-burial-of-an-undead-world

READ ESSAY HERE






Catalogue essay: What Remains and What’s Left Behind (2022)

Edited by: Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater, Michelle Jacques

This is the first ever retrospective publication on Trinidadian Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012). Thomasos’ often monumental canvases with overlapping gridded lines, fluid drips of paint and geometric architectural objects challenge the limits of minimalism and abstraction, while also embodying her dedication to social justice. Through pattern, scale and repetition, Thomasos conveyed the vastness of events such as the Transatlantic slave trade and mass incarceration, without exploiting the images of those affected by them. Thomasos writes: “like a carpenter, I rebuild the fragmented psychology of slave culture, revealing its fragile foundation.”

A series of essays addresses Thomasos’ dissection of art historical traditions; her interest in global architectures and physical structures of power and resistance; her focus on the history of slavery; and her commitment to exposing narratives of systemic racism. – Press Release: Art Gallery of Ontario

Additional contributions by: Adrienne Edwards, Marsha Pearce, Denise Ryner

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Symposium: unmoored, adrift, ashore (May 19-21, 2022)

Presented by: Or Gallery, Emily Carr University and Haus. der Kulturen der Welt

Convened by: Jamie Hilder, Denise Ryner, Jordan Wilson and Anselm Franke
Participants: Dr. Marianne Nicolson, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, QC, Morgan Guerin, Dr. Renisa Mawani, Dr. Alice Te Punga Somerville, Dr. Karamia Müller, Dr. Quito Swan, Dr. Rita Wong, Dr. Ayesha Hameed, Dr. Thea Quiray Tagle, LAIWAN, Dr. Ayasha Guerin, Dr. Lilian Yamamoto, Dr. Jamie Hilder, Dr. Charmaine Chua, Dr. Geoff Mann, Georgina Hill, Jane Jin Kaisen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dr. Katherine McKittrick

The warming climate brings an increasing sea-level rise that will redraw the interface between land and sea, the city and its shore. What is now known as the Greater Vancouver area, located on the Salish Sea, is one of the multitude of global coastal cities threatened by large areas of submersion when False Creek and the Fraser River break their banks. The City of Vancouver began a study of the impacts of this imminent event on the city’s coastline after the Provincial government advised municipalities to plan for a 2 metre sea level rise by 2200. Even by 2100, the City’s projections will see parts of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the site of this symposium, be reclaimed as a floodplain and susceptible to partial submergence. Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore aims to prepare us for the kinds of visioning we will require to increasingly adapt to a new and intensified relationship with water, and to think about how we can use the transformation of the ocean’s reach to reconsider our relationships to property, futures, economies, and each other.

This reclamation through water opens many possibilities for unsettling and shifting much of the legacy of Vancouver and the Northwest Coast region as a settler-colonial space, founded on unceded Indigenous territories. It allows for the possibility of expanding outside of the present time and local context, to think of the future sea-level rise beyond catastrophic terms and to imagine the potential of the rising water as revealing and restoring the presences and relations lost, or almost lost, to colonial forms of dispossession.

The symposium will include a series of examinations emerging from Indigenous and post-colonial thought that offer conceptions of water as a central component for decolonizing and disrupting conventional understandings of identity, borders, ownership and other forms of relations that stretch beyond territorial and commodity logics. These investigations include artistic and poetic imaginaries in the focus on Pacific regions, building on   the renewed emphasis on transregional Oceanic studies to address the urgencies of our shifting ecological context.

-Jamie Hilder (ECUAD), Anselm Franke (HKW), Denise Ryner (Or Gallery), Jordan Wilson (NYU)

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Essay: Denise Ryner Responds to Towards Accountability (2022)

Organized and published by Independent Curators International and Jordan Wilson
As part of Towards Accountability: Art and Institutions on Indigenous Territories, a series of public conversations curated and moderated by ICI’s 2021 Indigenous Curatorial Research Fellow, Jordan Wilson, ICI invited a group of curators to respond to the programs and share their written reflections.

In her response, Denise Ryner, Director and Curator at Or Gallery, Vancouver, explores the idea of “unrooting” and its critical potential for, and challenge to, arts institutions.

READ HERE

Respondant: Towards Accountability: Art and Institutions on Indigenous Territories,
Session #1 (2021)

Organized and published by Independent Curators International and Jordan Wilson
The installation of public art frequently initiates conversation and even polarizing debate about the role of art in community; the artworks, artists, curators, and institutions often face intense scrutiny and critique from a broad array of community voices that may otherwise not typically engage with contemporary art. With growing public and civic recognition of Indigenous assertions of territory and sovereignty, these instances and the subsequent discourse are further complicated.

What are the ‘limits’ of artistic freedom in regards to public art on Indigenous nations’ asserted territories? How have artists, curators, and institutions (whether galleries or cities/municipalities) navigated this terrain – and how is it shifting? How can Indigenous protocols, histories, and understandings of both place and relationality inform the development of public art projects?

Participating Speakers: Ange Loft, Kimberley Moulton and Jordan Wilson. Respondants: Liz Park, Denise Ryner, Eva Mayhabal Davis

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Essay: Fade Into Place (2020)

Canadian Art (Fall 2020) “Chroma”
guest-edited by Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee

Though we have been planning this issue since the fall of 2019 (and, arguably, have been dedicated to this work for most of our careers), we were aware that Chroma would be viewed within the longue durée of Black artists, curators and writers who have worked against their marginalization to establish their own cultural spaces while continuously engaging with this country’s shifting cultural and social imaginaries. More recently, the twin pandemics of systemic racism and COVID-19 have brought to the fore societal inequities that touch all sectors of life and work. The loss of a “normal” has created the potential for rapid, dramatic change. These two realities formed the environment in which Chroma was developed and assembled. —Yaniya Lee and Denise Ryner, co-editors

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READ ESSAY HERE





Essay: Hostile Centers and Hospitable Margins (2020)

in WHOSE LAND HAVE I LIT ON NOW?
CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE NOTIONS OF HOSTIPITALITY
S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin

edited by Federica Bueti, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY 
Elena Agudio, Ulf Aminde, Mohamed Amjahid, Arjun Appadurai, Bilgin Ayata, Ibrahim Arslan, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Jacques Coursil, Jihan El-Tahri, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Raisa Galofre, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Lionel Manga, Naeem Mohaiemen, Peter Morin, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Massimo Perinelli, Denise Ryner, Miriam Schickler, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Safiya Sinclair, Margarita Tsomou, Tania Willard

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Symposium: Bodies Borders Fields (2019)

Presented by: Or Gallery and Trinity Square Video

Convened by: Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee, admin support by Emily Fitzpatrick
Participants: Lillian Allen, Christina Battle, Raymond Boisjoly, Deanna Bowen, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Keyon Gaskin, Che Gossett, Sean D. Henry-Smith, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Steffani Jemison, Aisha Sasha John, Jessica Lynne, Charmaine Nelson, M Nourbese Philip, Tina Post, Krys Verrall, Kandis Williams, Bear Witness

A “simultaneous conversation” took place on August 16, 1967 between seven speakers in Toronto and New York with the cooperation of Bell Telephone Company, the CBC and artscanada magazine (formerly Canadian Art). This cross-border conversation was recorded and published in that year’s October issue of artscanada, which was, dedicated to “black” as a concept, painterly medium, symbol as well as socio-political category, expression and status.

Convened by Denise Ryner in collaboration with Yaniya Lee, Bodies Borders Fields is a free, public symposium that re-imagines the 1967 conversation about “blackness” with particular attention to blackness and fugitivity as represented in critical art practices today. Responding to an absence of black experience in the conversation between the 1967 panelists—an absence that has since been examined by writers Fred Moten, Krys Verrall and others—Bodies Borders Fields will dislocate the original panel discussion to contemporary contexts and representations of black and blackness in sound, performance and visual culture with respect to black social life and expression.

Bodies Borders Fields supports ongoing and future discussions of blackness as an ever-shifting, circulating and transforming factor for the survival and destabilization of colonial systems and institutions. All are welcome, especially those who recognize their own stake in contemporary readings of black and blackness as both signifier and lived-experience.

All roundtables, talks and panels are free and open to the public.

Bodies Borders and Fields design by Sameer Farooq.

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Essay: Fair-Weather Funding (2018)
What would it take to ensure that institutional diversity is not a passing fad?

in Canadian Art (Fall 2018) “Climates”
edited by David Balzer and Jayne Wilkinson

This is not an issue about what we see, but about what we register, and don’t register. Foremost it is an issue about how artists can help us register change. And it is, undoubtedly, an issue about the human impact on a variety of climates, and on the concept of climate itself. Our Planet of the Apes–style cover, by Calgary artist Jason de Haan, seems both speculative and satirical, playing on the concept of the carbon footprint while prompting our most romantic ideas of a post-human future. It also draws attention to the carbon footprint as a metaphor—and a fear-based fantasy. Surely, carbon tracking and offsetting is just another way we shift, rather than solve, a problem.

Here, an issue about a variety of uncomfortable climates that affect artists, their work and the art world. Here, art and ideas without the air conditioning.

—David Balzer, Editor-in-Chief/Co-Publisher, Jayne Wilkinson, Managing Editor

Read essay here






Symposium: WHOSE LAND HAVE I LIT ON NOW? INVOCATIONS (June 8-10, 2018)

at Silent Green/SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin

convened by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio and Denise Ryner
WITH Ulf Aminde, Mohamed Amjahid, Sepake Angiama and Clare Butcher (aneducation), Ibrahim Arslan, Nacera Belaza, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Canoafolk, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Jacques Coursil, Lynnée Denise, Jihan El-Tahri, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Heidrun Friese, Marque Gilmore, Niklas Maak, Naeem Mohaiemen, Negros Tou Moria, Peter Morin, Robert Nichols, Kettly Noël, Mitat Özdemir, Massimo Perinelli, Meral Şahin, Nahed Samour, Miriam Schickler, Lerato Shadi, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Safiya Sinclair, Tania Willard, Aaron Wilson

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Screening and Talk:
Bodies of Fact: The Archive From Witness to Voice (July 8, 2017)

at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

convened by Denise Ryner
WITH Filipa César, Grada Kilomba, Diana McCarty and Krista Belle Stewart

Featuring: 
Filipa César, 
Conakry, 2013

Krista Belle Stewart, Seraphine, Seraphine, 2015

The participating artists in Bodies of Fact each address the material and aesthetic legacies of colonial encounters and decolonization thorugh archival footage in their respective works, ‘Seraphine, Seraphine’ (2015) and ‘Conakry’ (2013).

In the frame of ‘Kanon-Fragen’, Bodies of Fact considers institutionalization and positioning as conducted through the regulatory system of the archive and the document. The artists in this program counter the historicizing of archival footage, shifting its reading from universal, political and cultural fact to one that imagines documents as extensions of private witnessing and embodied memory.

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Denise Ryner: Project Archive
[Committee Projects]
ctteeprojects@gmail.com
@dee.barclay











Bio

Denise Ryner developed her curatorial practice in academic and non-profit arts organizations in Toronto, Vancouver and Berlin. Independently curated projects include Sediment: the archive as a fragmentary base(2023-2024) at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal and Art Museum, University of Toronto; Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) (2022) co-curated with Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Claire Tancons and Zairong Xiang at HKW, Berlin, and Common Cause: before and beyond the global (2018) at Mercer Union, Toronto. From 2017 to 2022 she was Director/Curator at Or Gallery, Vancouver. In 2023 she joined the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania as Andrea B. Laporte Curator.


Click Here for CV




Last Updated 24.10.31



SEDIMENT: THE ARCHIVE AS A FRAGMENTARY BASE 
(#2 Toronto) 
January-March 2024 Art Museum, University of Toronto 
Installation documentation of the exhibition Sediment: The Archive as a Fragmentary Base at the Art Museum, University of Toronto, 2024. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid

Sedimentation is a geological process of settlement and solidification. Free-floating fragments come to rest at the bottom of a body of water where over time they lose their liquid content. Then gravitational pressure transforms these fragments into solid rock beds that not only become a firm base, but each layer serves as a record of human and natural activity.

The artists in this exhibition re-imagine the archive as these material fragments that may narrate presences, proximities, and solidarities. Sandra Brewster, Filipa César, Justine A. Chambers, Michael Fernandes, Louis Henderson, Pamila Matharu, and Krista Belle Stewart 
present image, sonic, and performance recontextualizations of state and official repositories, as well as familial and personal documents, to engage the archival image as counter-image through collapses of time, embodied memory, witnessing, and storytelling.

This presentation is an augmented version of an exhibition first produced and presented in 2023 at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University.

See more on the project page

Curatorial Essay



SEDIMENT: THE ARCHIVE AS A FRAGMENTARY BASE
(#1 Montreal)
February-April 2023 Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University

Installation documentation of the exhibition Sediment: The Archive as a Fragmentary Base at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, 2023. Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro
                   

Sedimentation is a geological process of settlement and solidification. Free-floating fragments come to rest at the bottom of a body of water where over time they lose their liquid content. Then gravitational pressure transforms these fragments into solid rock beds that not only become a firm base, but each layer serves as records of human and natural activity.

In order to re-imagine archives as material fragments that narrate presences, proximities and solidarities that persist as fissures in colonial ordering, this exhibition gathers the work of artists that represent movements against empire or movements along routes established in the wake of empire in terms of their text and image archives, and how such archives are configured into sedimentary bases upon which new identities, nations or diasporas may build and image themselves. Featuring film, video, photo and performance-based works by Sandra Brewster, Filipa César, Justine A. Chambers, Louis Henderson, Pamila Matharu, Krista Belle Stewart. 

See more on the Project Page

Read Curatorial Essay

Review in ‘Le Devoir’
CEREMONY (BURIAL OF AN UNDEAD WORLD)

October-December 2022 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Installation documentation of the exhibition Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World). Courtesy of Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2022. Photos: Studio Bowie

Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) is an exhibition that speaks of continuities among cosmologies and origin myths across space and time, only to upset, against this backdrop, the standard narratives of the modern era and its place in history. Ceremony refers to the writings of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter, for whom the “underside costs” of modernity, from dispossession and slavery to extractivism and climate change, are intimately linked to the “mutations” of Christian cosmology into the secular discourse of modernity. 

Ceremony brings together works of various genres and time-periods as well as historical documents with multiple interlocutors. It also includes an extensive program of live events and a publication.

Curators: Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, Claire Tancons, Zairong Xiang

See more on the project page






Sensing of the Wound: Whess Harman & Pamila Matharu

March 5 - April 30 2022, Or Gallery, Vancouver
Photo documentation by Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Or Gallery.
Through their combination of visual art and practices of convening collectives, artists Whess Harman’s and Pamila Matharu’s work configure DIY publishing, youth culture, and archival material into constellations that question what dominant narratives and erasures have made invisible. 

Curatorial Text PDF

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Artist talk with Pamila Matharu and Whess Harman, mod. Denise Ryner



Rachel O’Reilly: The Gas Imaginary 

October 2 - December 19, 2020 Or Gallery, Vancouver

Photo documentation by Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Or Gallery.


Rachel O’Reilly links international conceptualism’s hierarchy of the document over the object to the global implementation of registry-based land title acts that bypass Indigenous and settler relationships to land, and the various ecosystems on, above and below the surface of ‘property.’

O’Reilly, an Australian of settler-heritage, focuses on the detriment caused by colonial conceptions of land-relations and value in combination with the proliferation of mining and drilling-sites, and the influence of extractive industries. Specifically she examines the ‘Torrens Title,’ a land registry system introduced by the British and first instituted in Australia (1858) then Western Canada (1861) and Canada’s Northwest Territories (1886) followed by other regions including the Philippines, Ireland and Malaysia.

O’Reilly’s The Gas Imaginary (2013-2019) has used poetry, collaborative drawings, installation, moving images and lecture-formats to unpack the broader significance of ‘settler conceptualism,’ the racial logic of the property form and fossil fuel-based labour politics as capital exhausts the limits of land use.

In ongoing dialogue with elders of Gooreng Gooreng country and settler women activists, where shale gas fracking was approved for mass installation in ‘Australia,’ the final element of this project, INFRACTIONS, addresses the threatened destruction to 50% of the Northern Territory.

INFRACTIONS features musician/community leader Dimakarri ‘Ray’ Dixon (Mudburra); two-time Telstra Award finalist Jack Green, also winner of the the 2015 Peter Rawlinson Conservation Award (Garawa, Gudanji); musician/community leader Gadrian Hoosan (Garrwa, Yanyuwa); ranger Robert O’Keefe (Wambaya), educators Juliri Ingra and Neola Savage (Gooreng Gooreng); Ntaria community worker and law student Que Kenny (Western Arrarnta); musician Cassie Williams (Western Arrarnta); the Sandridge Band from Borroloola; and Professor Irene Watson (Tanganekald, Meintangk Bunganditj) contributor to the draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 1990-1994.

Rachel O’Reilly is an artist, writer/poet, curator and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture. She teaches the theory seminar ‘At the Limits of the Writerly’ on planetarity, political economy and poetics at the Dutch Art Institute. She was previously a curator at the Australian Cinematheque at the Gallery of Modern Art | Australian Cinematheque, Brisbane, and researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy.

Her artistic work and research have been presented internationally, most recently at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; E-flux, New York; and UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Recent curatorial collaborations include Ex-Embassy with Sonja Hornung and Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law with Natasha Ginwala. She co-wrote On Neutrality with Jelena Vesic and Vlidi Jeric for the Non-Aligned Modernisms series (MCA, Belgrade), publishes with Danny Butt on artistic autonomy in settler colonial space, and currently coedits Feminist Takes on Black Wave Film with Antonia Majaca and Jelena Vesic for Sternberg Press.

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Anna Zett: Hold On (2019)

October 16, 2019 - January 25, 2020  Or Gallery, Vancouver
Photo documentation by Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Or Gallery.


Hold On is an interactive multi-media installation that addresses two modes of language and their interplay: writing and speech. Writing, as the manipulation of matter to leave a trace, is intimately linked with the hand, while speech is connected to voice, rhythm and the act of listening. Both are linked by the materiality of the human body and brain, specifically the nervous system’s capacity for fine motor control and symbolic thought. In part responding to the omnipresent realty of the touch screen, Zett presents series of enigmatic bubble-like glass objects that invite viewers to grasp them, triggering an audio-visual meditation on the role of hands and voices on both a concrete and an abstract level.

Exploring the limits and symbolic meanings of tactility, a sensory experience often excluded from the gallery space, the exhibition continues Zett’s research into the operations of neurocapitaism – the process by which the self as a ‘unique’ individual is transformed into a site for resource extraction and profit – performed through self care, self improvement, and self branding. To get to know one’s brain ‘from the inside’ offers a subtle form of resistance. This will be Zett’s first exhibition in Canada.

The exhibition is accompanied by the launch of Zett’s first monograph,Artificial Gut Feeling, and a screening of her 2014 research drama, This Unwieldy Object. These distinct but conceptually related projects draw together Zett’s research into colonial histories, neuroscience, capitalist psychology, and the emotional and symbolic remnants of the German Democratic Republic.

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WHOSE LAND HAVE I LIT ON NOW?

CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE NOTIONS OF HOSTIPITALITY


May 19 - June 24, 2018 SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
Co-curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio and Denise Ryner
WHOSE LAND HAVE I LIT ON NOW? Contemplations on the Notions of Hostipitality unfolds through an exhibition, performances, lectures, film screenings and other time-based experiences to deliberate on concepts of hospitality and the triggers of hostility in hospitality. Much is happening today that calls for a reflection on hospitality in Germany, in Europe, and in the world at large. While departing from the national context of Germany, and taking Derrida's notion of "hostipitality" - that is the presence of hostility in all hospitality and hosting - as a point of commencement, the project is not limited in geography, history, philosophy nor culture to these origins, but rather addresses concepts of hospitality in a global context. By inviting, and being host to, artists, curators, musicians and other thinkers to reflect on the various thought and lived concepts of hospitality, the project creates a space for exchange, mutual respect and learning to pose questions that might instigate further thoughts. In an age of flourishing resentments and antipathy towards all that seems conceptually or physically ‘strange’/ a ‘stranger’, in a time when the historical violence of the guest (as a colonizer) over the host is reiterated and fortified, and in an era that increasingly turns hospitality into a neoliberal commodity, it becomes urgent to reconsider hospitality’s gradients of power.

Artists: Abbas Akhavan, Meriç Algün, Mounira Al Solh, Steeve Bauras, Deanna Bowen, Márcio Carvalho with Ali Al-Fatlawi, Wathiq Al-Ameri and Christian Etongo, Banu Cennetoğlu, Stephanie Comilang, Victor Ehikhamenor, Antje Engelmann, Louis Henderson, Eva Leitolf, Doris Maninger, Sabelo Mlangeni, Emeka Okereke, Neda Saeedi, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ming Wong, Tinofireyi Zhou.

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Joshua Schwebel: Solvent

March 1 - April 6, 2019 Or Gallery, Vancouver
Photo documentation by Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Or Gallery.
Solvent is the conclusion of Joshua Schwebel’s year-long research into the conditions and relationships that govern cultural activities and production at 555 Hamilton Street, home to Or Gallery since 2009. This work is presented in an architectural and audio-visual narrative that maps out the complicated ecology that connects publicly funded art spaces, private property development and urban cultural policies. Alluding to this vulnerability to shifts in the public and private sector, Schwebel’s work evokes the observations of curator and critic Nina Möntmann on the potential of art institutions as affirmations of cultural and political change due to their continued existence in such precarious circumstances.

Schwebel’s exhibition projects often refuse to uphold the authority of the art institution, instead mining gallery systems as collaborators in progressive re-structuring and re-orientation, if only temporarily. This process results in interventions that have, in previous projects, reversed the flow of monies for remuneration from presentation to unpaid student labour, or highlight the (in)visibilty of the socio-economic communities around gallery sites.

At the Or, Schwebel has followed evidence of structural deterioration at 555 Hamilton through to a line of stakeholders in the financial precarity of the gallery. Solvent also takes up the maintenance of nostalgia and authenticity that simultaneously underlines and complicates the existence of this site as a viable public, cultural space.

Keeping within the exhibition’s theme of self-reflexivity, Or Gallery’s location as a frequent site of shooting for film and television is referenced throughout Solvent. The title of the exhibition itself plays on associations of insolvent entities and dissolving structures inherent to many non-profit art centres.

Joshua Schwebel, based in Berlin and Montreal, often initiates site-specific interventions and installations as spatialized and participatory critiques of gallery and museum practices and conditions. Solvent will be his first exhibition in Vancouver.

Or Gallery would like to thank Jordan Milner, Kevin Romaniuk, Ellen O’Connor, Chipo Chipaziwa, Allen Forrister and Brian McBay for their contributions to the completion of this exhibition.

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Ligia Lewis: Breathing Room
Residency and Exhibition

January 19 - February 16, 2019 Or Gallery, Vancouver
Photo documentation by Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Or Gallery.
Breathing, as the condition for the dancing body’s giving and withholding, becomes the basis for a different kind of cinematic knowledge that has to do with the ontology of gesture in relation to black movement.

–Rizvana Bradley

Breathing Room explores the gallery as a site for holding time and space. In particular, this gesture is offered by Or Gallery to performance artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis.

Lewis has continually been touring her works minor matter and Sorrow Swagthroughout the past four years. While this unbroken stretch of presenting work marks Lewis’ success as an artist within international experimental dance and performance networks, it also belies the necessary but unpaid labour of research, theorizing and rehearsal that Lewis also does to support the conceptual rigour underlining her choreographic and performance practice.

By offering Breathing Room as a residency for Lewis, Or Gallery shifts between roles as a site of retreat, study and collaboration without asking that these activities result in the production or presentation of a work.

Instead, Breathing Room is a space surrounded by, but also consisting of a constellation of texts, video documentation, artists and speakers who have been invited to think through and alongside Lewis’ practice. This provides temporary relief to the isolation of the itinerant and brief engagements that are part of touring performance work while drawing attention to the body that works and creates in proximity to other bodies, connecting with Lewis’ interest in dependent and entangled subjectivity and selves.

The Breathing Room studio and reading room area frame the activities of Lewis’ research residency but are also a commons, open to visitors and invited groups for the duration of the installation and following Lewis’ departure on February 8th.

Thank you to Jordan Milner, Ellen O’Connor, Brady Cranfield, Pablo de Ocampo and the PuSH Festival

“Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion,” TDR: The Drama Review 62:1 (T237) Spring 2018.

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View exhibition roundtable talks




Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira Da Silva: 4 Waters - Deep Implicancy

September 29 - November 3, 2018 Or Gallery, Vancouver
Photo documentation by Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Or Gallery.
After breaking through the glassy, formal fixed walls of the Understanding, released from the grip of certainty, the imagination may wonder about reassembling the fundamental components of everything to refigure the World as a complex whole without order.
  • Denise Ferreira da Silva


Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s film works, Serpent Rain (2016) and 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2018), are experiments in entanglement and ways of “The Thinking of The World.”

Neuman and Ferreira da Silva’s artistic collaboration builds on their combined research and Ferreira da Silva’s planetary view of the world as a plenum, a complex terrain in which humans and geological, bacterial, and meteorological environments, although at times seemingly differentiated, are never really independent forms and phenomena. For Ferreira da Silva instead, the human and non-human are elements of each other. Nor does she exclude time from the entanglement of space and beings: what is considered ‘past’ and ‘history’ are merely different stages and transformations of the present.

Ferreira da Silva and Neuman both engage and challenge the time-based medium of film to investigate such transformations, shifting between scale, surface and perspective, and land and landscape. The artists edit and compile a combination of overhead and macroscopic imagery to unsettle rather than clarify, category, and organize their visuals. This image-based unsettling is further emphasized by a bass-driven soundtrack, which Neuman has paid particular attention to throughout his filmmaking practice: it vibrates through multiple sound channels and envelopes the separation between viewers and the found, archived, animated, and filmed images.

This flow – between sound, space, image, and viewer – echoes Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s interest in the form and ubiquity of water in 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy.Here, water is a model for undermining the seminal influence of Plato and his metaphysis, which separates the world in terms of fixed, ideal abstractions and an illusory sensorial materialism.

Serpent Rain similarly undoes our bodies and time by blurring the biological and physical borders of our existence. The film considers the implications of this lack of separation in terms of the entanglements of capital and the economy that keep the so-called geological, biological, and historical past circulating as commodity and value.

This exhibition is the first in a series presenting art practices centred on the production and expansion of research narratives.

Serpent Rain was commissioned by Stefano Harney for The Bergen Assembly.

4 Waters- Deep Implicancy was produced with the support of the Arts Council England, Hannah Barry Gallery and the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) and the Critical + Creative Social Justice Studies Research Excellence Cluster.

Thank you to Ellen O’Connor for her assistance with the wall text for this exhibition.


1. Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability, 2016

A VIFF MODES Community Partner event

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Common Cause: before and beyond the global

 February 16 - March 24, 2018 Mercer Union, Toronto
Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Mercer Union.
Installations by Fayçal Baghriche, Sandra Brewster, David Hartt and Jeneen Frei Njootli consider historical, present and speculative expansions on the global, as a permanently unfixed, interdependent but disordered whole. The global produced in their work is one borne of collective and underground actions that might resemble Harney’s and Moten’s ‘elsewhere.’

Such observations of globalized entanglement were made by Vancouver-based theorist Denise Ferreira Da Silva who asks in her 2016 essay, On Difference Without Separability, “What if, instead of the Ordered World, we imaged each (human and more-than human) existent consisted not as separate forms relating through the mediation of forces but rather, as singular expressions of each and every other existent as well as of the entangled whole in/as which they exist?”¹

Ferreira Da Silva's questions were provoked by the popular, political and legal hostilities that have emerged in response to the influx and movement of refugees and immigrants following economic crises and armed conflicts around the world. However her examination leads her to ask how a modern imaginary, limited by fixed separations of place and time allows the idea of humanity to become an enclosed term, denied to those who are displaced in the Ordered World and therefore objects of cultural difference.

The artists in this exhibition mine transnational counter-flows, cultural dispersions from geographical or social peripheries and alternative representations. Emerging and reclaimed ecologies and sovereignties underline the narratives of colonial trade routes, rebellion and migration in Brewster's work, are the result of the entanglements that comprise Hartt's fictions, mapped out in Frei Njootli's sound work and inferred by the visual dissolution in Baghriche’s installations.  

In featuring representations of a shared commons, a pervasive elsewhere to imagine globalized spaces of refuge, this exhibition responds to recent thinking by Moten, Harney and Ferreira Da Silva on how the global can be recuperated, identified and accessed beyond the mediating control of capital and the logic of the modern nation state.

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Graphic Work
Sculpture
CV

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PHANTOMAS — N° 35-36
Editions de la revue Phantomas
Bruxelles, 1962
Belgian literary magazine 1953–1980

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Lucian Freud, Recent Paintings
Anthony d’Offay
Paperback, London, 1972

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A Certain Ratio — Knife Slits Water
Factory Records — FAC 62
UK, September 1982
Graphic design by Peter Saville

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Tim Rollins & K.O.S.
Three works: Golden Horn Drawings (from America Series), 1989
Graphite and watercolor on book page.

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Blinky Palermo
Announcement card
Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles
Marie-Puck Broodthaers
Jan 31 – Mar 9, 1991

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Heinz Gappmayr
ZEIT WVZ. 1379 / 1993
ZEIT WVZ. 1410 / 1993

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Sculpture


1. Test Project

Alex Frost
From Alex Frost 1976
2004

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1. Test Project

Carl Andre
Margit Endormie, 1989
Photo: Ronald Amstutz
Dia Art Foundation, New York.


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Martin Kippenberger
Not to Be the Second Winner
Aldo Rossi chair on base
1987

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1. Test Project

Peter Fischli and David Weiss
Installation view, Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne, May 5–July 29, 1995

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1. Test Project

Joseph Beuys
Installation
Felt, stool, sculptor’s trestle, copper, tin, wire and rubber
Photograph by Volker Döhne

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1. Test Project

Alex Frost
Continuous Profile
Sculpture, 2004

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(upcoming) Tincidunt TBA
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2024

(upcoming) Vestibulum-Vitae
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Ultrices
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2023

Eu & Fringilla, Collaborative 
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Donec Tristique Porta Libero
2023

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2023

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2023

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2022

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2022

Euismod Gravida
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2022

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2022

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2022

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2021



AwardsTempus Egestas Nibh Vestibulum
Facilisis: Ultricies Ornare Ligula
2021

Rhoncus Auctor Ornare; Tincidunt Tristique, Porta Libero
2020



Press
‘Vestibulum Inceptos Gravida’, Ornare Review,
by Tincidunt Nisl
2024

‘Ullamcorper Faucibus (Congue) Euismod’, by Ligula Parturient, Bibendum Review Porta Libero
2023

Dictumst Tristique, Facilisis Magazine, Edition Two, Porta Libero
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2020

Sollicitudin Ornare Magazine,
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2020                  








Last Updated 24.10.31
© Denise Ryner 2025