Visual art & encounters
unpruned tomato vines
A digital exhibition in partnership with Tea Base
Saturday, May 1 to Monday, May 31
What was once rubble barricaded by fencing in Chinatown Centre has been transformed by Tea Base and Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT) into a community garden. In unpruned tomato vines artists Christie Carrière, Hannia Cheng, and Florence Yee share stories from the Chinatown Anti-Displacement Garden and trace the role of collective action and communal imagining in challenging forced displacement. Both Christie Carriere’s digital illustrations detailing the origin story of the garden and the premiere of Hannia Cheng’s short film tracing the garden’s growth will be available on VR Tea Base; an online community arts space created by Jason Li. Meanwhile, Florence Yee’s hand copied posters about the futility of rest can be found on physical street corners of Tkaronto and on the festival website.
Museum and Labour History with Brooke Downey
Tuesday, May 4 – Monday, May 31
As an emerging museum professional, Brooke quickly became interested in labour issues facing the cultural sector. Based on her own experiences in the non-profit sector, as well as union movements happening in the U.S. and the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was inspired to write a series of articles on museum labour with an intersectional lens. For Mayworks Festival, she will be taking this approach to the broader cultural sector and addressing labour issues which pervade for workers in the field. As problems cultural workers in Canada face are continuously obscured and ignored, the hope is for these articles to serve as a starting point for public conversations and actions that benefit all workers.
In the Water with Maggie Flynn
Guided Collaborative Research Session
Wednesday, May 5, 7:00-8:00PM
Performance
Thursday, May 27, 7:00-8:00PM
In the Water is a research and performance project that outlines the interconnections between extractive industries and arts institutions in Canada. The space of performance offers a moment to consider the impact of extractive industries on our material world, our economy, and platforms for artistic expression in Canada.
Latin@merica: Embedding Bodies and Localities
In partnership with Sur Gallery
Saturday, May 1 to Saturday, May 29
Through a series of installations at Sur Gallery and virtual interviews available on the Mayworks Festival website, Latin@merica: Embedding Bodies and Localities offers the possibility of rethinking how traditional place-based affiliations and notions of cultural identity end up reproduced, reaffirmed, or even transformed in the digital realm. The exhibition aims to highlight how technology has had an impact in the construction of Latin American identity and its networked localities. New forms of negotiation between the local and the global, between the virtual and the real are constantly being elaborated by the presented works, leading to new ways of understanding what it means to be Latinx and/or Latin American in a contemporary digital field.