MERCER

PAST EXHIBITION

Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili

28 January 2023 - 15 April 2023
Opening Reception 27 January 2023 7pm

Lydia Ourahmane’s Tassili (2022), is the fourth commission in Mercer Union’s Artist First program. At the centre of the exhibition is a moving image work filmed in Tassili n’Ajjer, a Sahara plateau in southeastern Algeria. Once a fertile “plateau of rivers,” as the translation of its name implies, the region is now an arid expanse […]

PAST EVENT

fORUM: Vanessa Parent

RSVP to Join us at the Gallery   Conjuring Resonance: Scrying Feminist Pasts  “I can’t break with my resignation and subordination (…) if I don’t find in other women as well my desire to get out, to attack, to destroy…”—Anonymous Anarcho-Feminist, Italy, 1979  Art historian Vanessa Parent elaborates on the metaphor of the scryer in […]

PAST EVENT

fORUM: Sebastian De Line with Qanita Lilla

Listening to the Vault  On the surface, the museum vault is a storage unit and a place of sanitized preservation. But it embodies an unseen reality. It is where Indigenous and African Ancestors (remains and cultural belongings) live. It is a home, not of light, warmth, and intimacy above ground but a bunker—an underground address […]

PAST EVENT

Before Law: Launch Party with Performance by Oliver Husain

Mercer Union is thrilled to host the launch of Before Law, an ambitious web-based project by artists Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Kyle Mitchell (Bamboat | Mitchell) featuring the work of more than a dozen contemporary artists, writers, poets, and thinkers. For one night only, we’ll be transforming Mercer Union in celebration of the bugs and […]

PAST EVENT

Video Walkthrough: Scryer in the Archive

Aimée Zito Lema gives a virtual tour of her solo exhibition, Scryer in the Archive. Taking as a starting point her family’s experience of living in Argentina during the political turmoil of the 70s, the artist shares her process of working with the material memory of paper, and reflects on how the photographic image traces […]

PAST EVENT

The African Desperate with Martine Syms

Event begins at 6:30PM EST The Canadian premiere of Martine Syms’ film, The African Desperate (2022) is accompanied by a virtual Q&A with the director, moderated by programmer Nataleah Hunter-Young.  Newly minted MFA Palace Bryant — effectively played by artist Diamond Stingily — has survived the white chaos of art school in Upstate New York […]

PAST EVENT

fORUM: Harold Offeh

Led by artist Harold Offeh, this workshop playfully explores the potential of the camera, the smartphone, and the selfie stick to mediate our experience of the body through the expressions our actions and gestures transmit in the recorded image. Connections between the body, photography, and archival reproduction present in Aimée Zito Lema’s exhibition are extended […]

PAST EVENT

fORUM: Giulia Damiani

Le Nemesiache in 1970s and 1980s Naples: a gallery tour, group reading, and conversation between Giulia Damiani and Helena Reckitt “WE DENOUNCE the violence which deprived ourselves of our bodies, of our expressions and of our extensions. CREATIVITY IS POLITICAL, it is life, routine, erotics, in harmony with nature and the cosmos.” — Le Nemesiache, […]

PAST EXHIBITION

SPACE: Lotus Laurie Kang | Mother Always Has a Mother: Wheat

30 September 2022 - 26 January 2023

Mercer Union’s SPACE billboard commission has invited artist Lotus Laurie Kang for its 2022–23 season for a yearlong series titled, Mother Always Has a Mother. Known for her sprawling installations and distinctive material repertoire, Kang’s practice is a dialogue with entropy. Elegantly disordered and richly layered, her site-sensitive works explore the relational bonds between time, […]

PAST EXHIBITION

fORUM: Resonance and Transmission

17 September 2022 - 19 November 2022

Resonance and Transmission is a multi-part events program informed by Aimée Zito Lema’s embodied entanglements with archival materials. Exploring cultural and artistic responses to recorded histories, practices of appropriation, and corporeal memory, the series asks: What does it mean to resonate with a movement, an artist or an event? What does resonance mean and what […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Aimée Zito Lema: Scryer in the Archive

17 September 2022 - 26 November 2022
Opening Reception 16 September 2022 7pm

Throughout her practice, artist Aimée Zito Lema has engaged with questions of social memory and the body as an agent of resistance. Her exhibition at Mercer Union takes up these interests in relation to personal and collective photographic histories, with a particular meditation on how the diasporic experience complicates such categorical boundaries.   Moments of protest […]

PAST EVENT

SUMMER CLOSURE

The gallery is closed to the public while we install our fall exhibition, Aimée Zito Lema’s commissioned project, Scryer in the Archive; we will resume regular gallery hours on 17 September. Mercer Union’s office will be closed for summer holidays from 27 August to 5 September. During our closure, you can reach us via email […]

PAST EVENT

Video Walkthrough: Evidence

Guest curator Amy Zion gives a virtual tour of Evidence, a group exhibition featuring the work of artists Brian Belott, Petrit Halilaj, Ulrike Müller, Oscar Murillo, and Alanis Obomsawin. Speaking to each project in the exhibition, Zion reflects on the artists’ foregrounding of art by children in their practices, and the profound insights that children’s art can offer […]

PAST EVENT

Artist Afternoons

Save the date! Our community social, Artist Afternoons, returns this August. We invite artists, friends, peers and neighbours to join us on the patio, and take in our summer exhibitions with good company. Gather around Shellie Zhang’s SPACE commission, A day passes like a year: Ode to Summer, and catch the final days of our summer […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Evidence

Brian Belott, Petrit Halilaj, Ulrike Müller, Oscar Murillo, and Alanis Obomsawin

Curated by Amy Zion

24 June 2022 - 20 August 2022
Opening Reception 23 June 2022 7pm

This exhibition contains artworks that deal with themes, images and stories that some viewers may find distressing, including children’s experiences of residential schools, war, and the aftermath of conflict. An Exhibition Viewing Guide will be available in the gallery with more information; a digital version is available here.   Evidence is a group exhibition featuring […]

PAST EXHIBITION

SPACE: Shellie Zhang | A day passes like a year: Ode to Summer

21 June 2022 - 17 September 2022

Mercer Union’s SPACE billboard commission has invited artist Shellie Zhang for its 2021–22 season for a yearlong series titled, A day passes like a year. Known for her highly composed still life works that assemble objects of pop iconography, cultural construction, and diasporic memory, Zhang’s photographs offer vibrant gestures of reclamation, humor, and dissidence. In […]

PAST EVENT

Video Walkthrough: 45th Parallel

Lawrence Abu Hamdan gives a virtual tour of his solo exhibition, 45th Parallel. Speaking to his interest in the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, the artist gives us a glimpse into the stories told in his commissioned film, and reflects on what they tell us about permeable borders and impermeable laws.      2021-22 […]

PAST EVENT

SESSION: Suneil Sanzgiri

REGISTER TO ATTEND Artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri invites audiences to collectively unpack and collaboratively explore questions around borders, nationalism, identity, and state-based violence. Prompted by a passage from Harsha Walia’s book Border & Rule and one of Sanzgiri’s own short films, this wide-ranging and informal conversation will look at how the moving image might […]

PAST EVENT

fORUM: Lawrence Abu Hamdan with Tina Sherwell

Lawrence Abu Hamdan joins art historian Tina Sherwell for a conversation engaging the film and exhibition 45th Parallel (2022) to discuss the challenge and opportunity of creating work across borders.       Download the PDF transcript here — Lawrence Abu Hamdan (born in 1985, Amman, Jordan) is a “Private Ear.” His interest in sound and […]

PAST EXHIBITION

SPACE: Shellie Zhang | A day passes like a year: Ode to Spring

21 March 2022 - 20 June 2022

Mercer Union’s SPACE billboard commission has invited artist Shellie Zhang for its 2021–22 season for a yearlong series titled, A day passes like a year. Known for her highly composed still life works that assemble objects of pop iconography, cultural construction, and diasporic memory, Zhang’s photographs offer vibrant gestures of reclamation, humor, and dissidence. In […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: 45th Parallel

26 March 2022 - 4 June 2022

45th Parallel focuses on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House—a unique municipal site between the jurisdictions of Canada and the United States. Constructed in 1904 under the patronage of the local Haskell family, this building was deliberately designed to straddle the frontier between Canada and the US as a symbolic act of unity in the […]