Saturday, January 6, 2024
1:30 PM
The Commons at 401 Richmond (4th Floor)
Please join us for an in-person conversation between Berlin-based artist Stephanie Comilang, and Toronto-based curator, writer and researcher, Heather Canlas Rigg. Comilang and Canlas Rigg’s practices have intersected for a number of years, including their feature interview, “I am the colour of burnt pineapple, mango, lemon” (C Magazine, 15 June 2019) and the exhibition Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser: Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (Gallery TPW, 2022). We are delighted to bring Comilang and Canlas Rigg together for their first-ever public program in conversation, on the occasion of the Canadian premiere of Comilang’s exhibition How to Make A Painting from Memory, on view at Gallery 44 January 5—February 3, 2024.
Home and community figure prominently in How to Make A Painting from Memory, a composite installation of sculpture, still and moving images; communal architectures—whether built structures or the interdependency of people in place—are malleable, nomadic containers of memory and belonging. Grounded in a familiar image of the Bayanihan (men carrying wooden nipa, referencing the spirit of cooperation and being in-community), Thai female migrant storytellers in an adjacent film, whose vocalized memories of their family homes are also rendered as 3D-printed spirit houses, the exhibition elucidates concepts of communal unity, cooperation and the protective spirit of place as modes of diasporic home-making, reciprocity, trust and relationality.
Listen to the live recording on G44 Digital.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working in Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital, and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at the Tate Modern, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Julia Stoschek Collection, and Haus der Kunst. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Heather Canlas Rigg is a curator and writer based in Toronto. She is the Artistic Director of CONTACT Photography Festival, and is half of the curatorial collective ma ma. Canlas Rigg’s practice explores all mediums, and is rooted in investigating how artists employ the materiality of camera technologies to interrogate imperialist structures.
