Organized under the groundwork program, Mercer Union invites artist Luis Jacob to develop The Order of Canada (I’ll Be Your Mirror), an artistic project comprising new works in dialogue with a site-specific intervention, as well as a weekly reading group and a series of talks with invited speakers. The Order of Canada (I’ll Be Your Mirror) offers an exercise in close looking and considers how we might get past the noise to detect the signals in need of our attention.
How can we see erasure?
A set of seismograms—traces of shocks—were generated at the Pickering station of the Southern Ontario Seismic Network. These measurements took the pulse at two precise moments: at 12:15pm, on 16 November 2023 (when the “departure” of Wanda Nanibush, the AGO’s Curator of Indigenous Art, was announced)—and at 10:16am, on 10 January 2024 (the time of announcement of the “departure” of Taqralik Partridge, the museum’s first Inuit curator).
An NDA is a non-disclosure agreement—a legal tool designed to prevent someone from disclosing information deemed sensitive by the one who wields the tool.
How can we hear silencing?
A finger points to a wall at the entrance to the AGO’s Department of Indigenous + Canadian Art galleries. The wall once contained a text—in Anishnaabemowin, English, and French—that outlined a mandate indexed upon nation-to-nation relationships, now completely washed away.
An SOS is a universal signal of distress—a transmission now emitted in Canada, that is, in the context of a nation-state premised on dispossession, barriers to contact, severed signals, colonial amnesia and shattering of codes.
I think red thoughts. Red is the colour that reveals itself when we close our eyes. Red is the colour of animal life, coursing deep within us all. Red is beautiful. Red is the colour that whitewashing innocently desires to erase.
Red is what remains.
Public Programming
Ordering the Museum
“The Museum,” writes Manuel Borja-Villel, “is a meeting-place with a variety of strange objects, spaces and times.”
Such strangeness can serve to destabilize the things we take for granted, disrupting our assumptions about other people and about our place in the world. It can also reflect the points of tension, the irreconciled contradictions of our own daily lives. The Museum intensifies our experience of the things that do not make sense.
Most often, however, museums tend to do the opposite: they domesticate strangeness, designate our lives in common as being unworthy of attention, affirm existing power-relations in the search for ‘exceptional quality’, and leave audiences in awe towards the aura of wealth. In this way, the Museum becomes an ordering-device that fixes strangeness and re-stabilizes what we are permitted to take for granted.
Caught between these two visions, we gather to consider the ways in which the Museum diminishes or else intensifies our experience of what we cannot accept.
This program is initiated and facilitated by Luis Jacob with the following invited speakers:
Ordering the Museum with Dr. Amy Fung
Saturday, 13 September 2025, 11am–1pm
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Dr. Amy Fung is a writer, educator, and cultural organizer researching across histories and identities. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University co-hosted by the Department of History and the School of Community and Public Affairs. Her SSHRC-funded PhD dissertation under historian Dr. Laura Madokoro (Carleton University) was a multidisciplinary study on the processes, refusals, and limitations of political recognition via official apologies and commemorations for past injustices and community grievances in a settler state. She is a recipient of the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research. Her first book, Before I was a critic I was a human being was the recipient of one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the $35M Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program.
Fireflies
12 July–23 August 2025
Saturdays, 11am–1pm
Advanced reading is required, please see syllabus below.
The “Fireflies” reading group focuses on Georges Didi-Huberman’s poetic book, Survival of the Fireflies (2018), read alongside additional short texts from Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and AA Bronson. Gathering once a week in July and August, Luis Jacob invites participants to search together for the flickering lights of friendship during a time of fascism. No prior knowledge of contemporary art is needed, only a desire to emit your signals.
The “Fireflies” reading group is free. Participants are invited to attend all seven weekly sessions. Vegetarian refreshments will be provided.
Syllabus
12 July
Dionne Brand, “Protest Movements, Potency, Co-option, Arriving After”
19 July
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Hells”
26 July
Georges Didi-Huberman. “Survivals”
2 August
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Apocalypses”
9 August
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Peoples”
16 August
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Destruction”
Saidiya Hartman, “Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible”
23 August
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Images”
AA Bronson, “A Word of Caution”
This page will be updated with additional programming announcements as they come out each month. Sign up for our mailing list to receive them in your inbox.
