The Institute of Making Space for Noncompetitive Looms Gift Shop
Friday, August 1, 2025 -
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Collectives:
The Institute of Making Space for Noncompetitive Looms Gift Shop
A collaboration between: LMRM, Making Space, The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research, The Institute of Institutional Critique
Storefront exhibition online and viewable 24/7 at Whippersnapper, 594B Dundas Street West Toronto
Gift shop open to the public on Saturday August 23 from 1-7pm + Sunday August 24 from 12-5pm
Performance + Artist talk with the collectives: August 23, 4-6pm at 34 Stephanie Street
Gift shops are like the final exhibition in a museum, the unmissable stop on the visitor’s path to the exit. Generating up to as much as a quarter of a museum’s revenue, gift shops are crucial to museums’ bottom line. The gift shop’s contributions aren’t solely economic, they serve an important cultural role by highlighting the aspects of art the institution deems important. Repeated exposure to a work of art (on a postcard, a mug, an eraser, a pair of socks) increases our preference for it. Utilizing this psychological phenomenon known as the ‘exposure effect,’ gift shops shape the most significant parts of our museum visit, influencing what we consider ‘Great Art.’
In an effort to highlight the labour behind the production of art, this exhibition uses the gift shop form to give a humourous peek into the operations that are invisible in the artworks you see on display in galleries and museums. The Institute of Making Space for Noncompetitive Looms Gift Shop is a collaboration between four collectives: LMRM, Making Space, The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research, and The Institute of Institutional Critique. Having bonded over their shared interests in collaboration, slowness, and the unseen labour demanded by cultural work, each collective has produced merchandise that speaks to the continuous bureaucratic and administrative work that has become an essential part of the creative process. The merchandise for sale at this quasi-fictitious gift shop draws attention to the fundraising, bookkeeping, planning, feeding, conflict management, and imaginative problem-solving that is asked of artists and arts workers in order to make and show their work. By parodying the conventions of these highly curated retail spaces, The Institute of Making Space for Noncompetitive Looms Gift Shop proposes the transformation of the museum gift shop from a site of detached consumerism to one where we can talk openly about the working conditions that necessitate more collective solidarity.
The gift shop will be open to the public on August 23rd, 2025 from 1-7pm and Sunday August 24, 2025 from 12-5pm. Outside of these opening hours, items can be purchased on the online storefront: lanflorenceyee.com/publication-shop
This exhibition is part of a programming series supported by Collective Collective, a project between eight visual arts collectives with majority racialized membership. As a response to the systemic racism and exploitative labour conditions in the arts, as well as the interrelated lack of sustainability within the sector, we are testing out organizational and curatorial practices that center values of collectivity, solidarity, and mutual aid through resource and labour sharing.
Accompanying Programming:
Performance + Artist Talk
August 23, 2025, 4-6pm at 34 Stephanie Street
Making Space: Notice of Annual General Meeting (appx. 15 minutes)
Date: August 23, 2025
Time: 4pm
Location: 34 Stephanie Street
This AGM will include: Presentation of the annual report, review of financial statements, and important and very real bureaucratic processes for a very serious event.
Members can access the meeting materials, including the annual report, financial statements eventually.
For the purpose of this event, all audience members will be considered members and have voting power.
If you are unable to attend, please appoint a proxy by shouting the name of your proxy into the wind at sunset.
An artist talk and closing reception with the LMRM.
LMRM (“loom room”) is a project space that blends art, research, and community programming around digital weaving. Based in Chicago, LMRM is currently one of few places in the world offering public access to a TC2 digital jacquard loom and the only one in the U.S. with an open studio model: no residency application, and no university enrollment. Through rental equipment, workshops, events, and collaborations, LMRM strives to emphasize weaving as a contemporary art practice.
LMRM was founded by visual artist Hope Wang in 2020. Since then, LMRM expanded to include creative administrator Murat Ahmed as Co-Director. Between their shared passion for alternative art economies and maker spaces, Hope and Murat are committed to building a studio culture organized around experimentation, cross-pollination, and slowness
Making Space is a virtual peer mentorship program focusing on the needs and wants of BIPOC artists, co-organized by two best friends: Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun. They operate mainly through an ongoing community Discord page where artists share their work, questions, and any resources that they feel may benefit artists in the collective (readings, calls for artists, etc.). Through their programming, Making Space prioritizes collaboration, paying artists and facilitators above CARFAC fees, safe gathering in virtual spaces, and the overall autonomy and agency of racialized artists across contemporary arts communities.
The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research is a group of artists and researchers who explore how slow philosophy, dialogue, collaboration, pedagogy, and public space intersect. Founded in 2021, the Bureau has taken on academic and artistic projects, namely Slowness and the Institution (2021), Pedagogy and Time (2022), Giving Nothing (2023), The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research (2023-24), and Curating the Collection (2024). The Bureau comprises Stacey Cann, José Cortés, Daniel Fiset, Po B. K. Lomami, and Victoria Stanton.
The Institute of Institutional Critique (TIIC) is an occasional, fictional institution created to critique itself. The project’s co-directors, co-curators, installation technicians, and unpaid interns are Lan “Florence” Yee and Mattia Zylak. TIIC questions the opportunities, possibilities, and impossibilities of critical curating while asking how and for whom institutional critique is performed.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
