Opening Reception, Talk & Performance – the excess is ritual

Join us for the opening reception and gallery talk with guest curator Noor Bhangu and loom demonstration with Norwegian artist Damien Ajavon.

Based in Oslo, Norway, Damien Ajavon is a queer non-binary textile artist, born in France, of Senegalese and Togolese origin. They use textiles as a language for storytelling that weave together elements of their ancestry. Ajavon employs African and Western influences as important visual markers in their work that also seeks to connect their identity of Blackness and queerness to their notions of home, origin, and spirit. They have been exhibited in several group exhibitions and has been invited to residencies in North America, Europe, and Africa. Their work was recently included in the Oslo Commune public collection.

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice is rooted in relational curatorial aesthetics and practices. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories of representation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.