A public intervention and gallery installation by Farrah Miranda, Graciela Flores, Tings Chak, Nadia Saad, and Vino Shanmuganathan
September 5-28th, 2013
Opening reception on Thursday, September 12, 7-10pm
CONVERSATION
Wednesday, September 18th, 7pm-9pm, at Double Double Land (209 Augusta, down the alley, 1st door on your right)
The final stage of this project consists of a face-to-face conversation between spectators, performers, gallery visitors, artists and activists, where we discuss the themes and tactics of the project. Bring your feelings, ideas and concerns invoked by this project and join us.
PUBLIC INTERVENTION
August 12, 2013, 6:15 PM at Cloud Gardens, 14 Temperance Street
Calling all white-identified friends, allies, artists, and activists to participate as performers in our public intervention! If you are participating, please register at this link and wear a white shirt.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Our names are Farrah Miranda, Graciela Flores, Vino Shanmuganathan, Nadia Saad, and Tings Chak. We are a collective of women of color artists and activists, engaging the public to reconsider these questions. Read more about us and our work here.
THE PROJECT
Farrah Miranda, Graciela Flores, Tings Chak, Vino Shanmugnathan and Nadia Saad’s public intervention and subsequent gallery installation will force histories of settler colonialism into a public sphere, that often refuses to recognize it. Provoking questions about the supposed “naturalness” of whiteness and colonialism as the backdrop to which others arrive, the intervention consists of a simple image: that of an open-air ship, filled with white Canadian-subjects docked in a public space. Captured through photographs, video, news of the ship’s arrival will be shared via social media, stirring public conversation around these themes.
This action will be followed up by a discussion and exhibition in Whippersnapper’s gallery space in September. In the meantime you can contribute to the dialogue via twitter: #massarrival, and watch www.massarrival.com for full details and updates.
TWO CRITICAL RESPONSES
In order to support and encourage critical and constructive dialogue, we have asked two writers to offer their perspectives on where this project lies in the expanse of art, politics, and lived realities. Yen Chu and Francisco-Fernando Granados offer insight and critique to the discussion:
Francisco-Fernando Granados’ Confessions of an Ungrateful Refugee
Yen Chu’s Mass Arrival and Santuary City
BACKGROUND
On October 17, 2009, a freighter by the name of the MV Ocean Lady, carrying 76 Tamil migrant men was seized off the coast of British Columbia (B.C.), also known as Coast Salish Territories. Less than a year after the MV Ocean Lady landed ashore in Canada, another large boat arrived, this time holding 492 Tamil passengers. Shortly prior to the arrival of the second ship, an online survey of just over 1,000 Canadians, which has a margin of error 19 times out of 20, found that 48 per cent of those polled would deport the passengers from the Sun Sea. That’s even if the refugee claims are found to be legitimate and there is no discernible link between the migrant and a terrorist organization. Thirty-five per cent of those surveyed would allow them to stay in Canada as refugees if their claims are found legitimate (Fong, 2010).
Mainstream media and Canadian state discourses framed these incidents as “mass arrivals”, and characterized the migrants aboard these ships as dangerous, disease carrying, foreign invaders, who violated the territorial integrity of the Canadian nation state. At its core, the arrival of the Tamil ships was about race, space, national identity and the politics of belonging.
In 1492, ships just like the MV Sun Sea and Ocean Lady pulled up to the shores of Turtle Island. A war was waged against the original Indigenous inhabitants of this land. The legacy of this war is a Canadian national identity birthed in claims to racial and moral purity and enclosed in borders. In the context of the Canadian nation state, whiteness becomes the natural backdrop against which migrants arrive and is constructed both as innocent and invisible. Emanate from these contexts are themes of visibility and invisibility; themes of historical erasure and assertion; and the question, who has the moral legitimacy to decide who belongs in the settler colonial nation state? It becomes clear that while some (white) arrivals form the basis of national creation stories, others form the basis for fear, hysteria, and the tightening of border policy and control.
The artists would like to thank the South Asian Visual Arts Collective, the Ontario Arts Council and the voters at FEAST Toronto for their support.
