17 March 2019 12pm - 3pm

SESSION is a project modelling itself after an incubator that invites cultural practitioners to engage with questions that emerge out of a given exhibition.

Philosopher Rebecca Comay has suggested that “violence likes to occult itself – the apparatus of terror requires this obfuscation – and one of the most systematic mechanisms of ‘disappearance’ is that the traces of disappearance are made to disappear.” Though Comay was writing about Doris Salcedo’s work in response to the Colombian Civil War, Ricky Varghese will lead a SESSION on this very same observation as it relates to Nep Sidhu’s Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded). What is the role of historical memory when considering the trauma of unimaginable violence? How does artistic abstraction mourn the terror of ungrievable loss? How do brutalized bodies and disappeared knowledges live on under the sign of a history of violence? Trained in psychoanalysis and the philosophy of history, Varghese explores the reverberations of these questions at the very core of Sidhu’s work.

Ricky Varghese is a Toronto-based art critic, writer, and psychotherapist.

Space is limited; please RSVP to office@mercerunion.org or 416.536.1519

SESSION is made possible with Leading Support from TD Bank Group