Give Me Shelter

Demolition Permit, 2024
Performance, paper, cardboard, glue and digital prints on adhesive vinyl

In her performance Demolition Permit, presented at the opening reception of this exhibition, Aymara Alvarado Lang destroyed piñatas shaped like the new condo buildings being erected in Hull, Gatineau, Québec. With this work, the artist, a Hull resident, decries the proliferation of unaffordable housing in this economically disadvantaged area.

After studying drawing, painting and sculpture at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, Aymara Alvarado Lang followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, Carlos Alvarado Lang, who was an engraver. Her admiration for classical painters led her to experiment with oil on canvas and gold leaf. Her current approach merges old and new techniques, with a hope to abolish their borders.

La Comunidad de la Pala 2.0, 2024
Photographs and video, 3:46 min., colour, sound

La Comunidad de la Pala 2.0 by the collective Arquitectura Expandida is a community-driven architectural project in Bogotá that empowers local residents to design and build their own public spaces. The work emphasizes collective action and the potential for architecture to be a tool for social change, particularly in marginalized and low-income communities.

Formed in 2010, Arquitectura Expandida is an activist collective that collaborates with grassroots movements in the research, exploration and creation of alternative spaces for experimental governance, citizen participation and self-management in peripheral urban areas. Among its core members are architects Ana López Ortego and Harold Guyaux, and artist Viviana Parada. As a collective, they focus on people’s rights to the city, on the urban commons, and on rebalancing the asymmetries of power in the public space. Their work has been recognized by several international organizations and events, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Printed matter and educational materials, 1997-2024

The Centre for Urban Pedagogy adopts a direct activist approach with its toolkit What is Affordable Housing? This interactive workshop tool breaks down complex housing policies to help communities advocate for more equitable solutions in their respective neighbourhoods.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to increase meaningful civic engagement, particularly among underrepresented communities. CUP projects demystify urban policy and planning issues—from the juvenile justice system to zoning law to food access—that impact communities, enabling more individuals to actively participate in shaping them. Founded in 1997 by a group of individuals from the fields of art, architecture, design, political theory and public policy, CUP has expanded its work from publications, videos and exhibitions to collaborations with students, artists, community organizations and advocacy groups. It continues to spread its work and its message throughout New York City.

B/Side, 1996
Video, 40 min., colour and black and white, sound

B/side is a provocative exploration of urban homelessness, combining sensitive footage of the external realities faced by the homeless with imaginative portrayals of their interior fantasies. Framed by scenes from Dinkinsville, an encampment on New York's Lower East Side where some of the homeless from Tompkins Square Park settled after the June 1991 riots, the film begins with the encampment's first night and ends with the fire and subsequent destruction of the lot in October of the same year.

Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film and video works and installations, and six books. Cultural displacements, mostly urban ones, have been at the heart of her concerns. Her films, often made in collaboration with poets and composers, have been widely awarded and shown in museums and festivals internationally. In 2010, she was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship in Visual Arts and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among many others. Child is professor emerita at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

B4 & After the Studio Pt. 1, 2019
HD video, 11:02 min., colour, sound

Courtesy of: Greene Naftali, New York, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Commissioned in 2019 for an exhibition at the Hudson Yards art space The Shed, B4 & After the Studio Pt. 1 examines the intertwined relationship between art and real estate development, repurposing a text on the 1988 Tompkins Square Riot and an excerpt from Sharon Zukin’s 1989 book Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. To Zukin, the artists’ lofts of Soho acted as agents of revalorization, converting industrial space into cultural capital, in turn clearing the way for the conversion of downtown space into terrain fit for “high class use.”

Tony Cokes is a conceptual artist who works with video, text, sound and installation. By appropriating and recombining elements from popular music, critical theory and current events, he creates visually striking minimalist works that examine how race, authority and the politics of space are intertwined. His work has been featured in major art institutions and events, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Documenta 10, Kassel. Cokes teaches in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.

What's the Difference Between a Prisoner of War and a Homeless Person?, 1991
Poster
53.34 cm x 40.64 cm

On loan from the Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada

The Guerrilla Girls’ What’s the Difference Between a Prisoner of War and a Homeless Person? offers a biting critique of governmental neglect, comparing people experiencing homelessness with prisoners of war, who are entitled to food, shelter and medical care under the Geneva Convention. The work forces viewers to confront the harsh realities of life without shelter and the societal indifference that often accompanies it.

Founded in New York in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist artist-activists who use the mechanisms of advertising and media culture to expose gender and racial inequality in the art world and beyond. Known for appearing in public wearing gorilla masks, the Guerrilla Girls engage in actions that include stealth interventions in art institutions, exhibitions, performances, videos, books, workshops and public talks. Their provocative, shocking and often humorous projects have appeared in cities around the world, in both street projects and in exhibitions at venues such as the Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Basel, Hong Kong; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Venice Biennale.

Vestavin, 2011
Artist book

D.I.Y. inventiveness is featured in the site-specific work Vestavin by Joar Nango and Tanya Busse. By creating custom wine-making kits that transform a multitude of locally available produce into unique wines, the artists have turned unlikely places, such as underground parking garages and the backs of bus stations, into sites for harm reduction, offering a safer alternative to low-cost, non-palatable alcohol often consumed in these overlooked spaces.

Joar Nango is a Sámi-Norwegian artist and architect whose practice explores the discourse between architecture and Indigenous culture, and the political issues that arise from colonization in northern Europe. Often created collaboratively with others, his work serves as a platform for discussing Sámi and Indigenous architecture within a European context. Nango’s projects have been presented at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, at the Chicago Architecture Biennale and in the Nordic Countries Pavilion as part of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. 

Tanya Busse is a Canadian artist based in Tromsø, Norway, who works across the mediums of moving-image, installation and photography. Her practice explores the synthesis of nature, often combined with an industrial, post-human experience. She is interested in deep-time, invisible architecture and how power is produced and articulated through material relationships and histories of place. Busse is also the director of Mondo Books, an independent artists’ book platform based in Tromsø. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals both in Canada and internationally, including the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Turku Biennial of Art in Finland and the Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Sweden.

paraSITE, 1997
Plastic, duct tape and fan

paraSITE is an ongoing project by Michael Rakowitz begun in 1997. The work consists of emergency shelters created for vulnerable populations utilizing the outflow from building HVAC systems to inflate and warm them. The work draws attention to the homelessness crisis and the despairing ways some people struggle to survive in harsh urban environments.

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American conceptual artist who became known in the late 1990s for his project paraSITE. Operating what he calls a “redirective practice,” which allows him to approach other disciplines, such as architecture, through the lens of an artist, he creates public projects, installations and events that address pressing social and political issues. His Middle Eastern identity often figures prominently in his work, as in RETURN (2004-ongoing), a multifaceted project in which he attempts to import dates from Iraq into the US, in part to “illustrate the cultural richness of a country in crisis.” Rakowitz is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, and his work has been shown in major museums and biennales around the world. He is a professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois.

Financialized, 2018-2024
Digital prints on Diabond, vinyl and paper, variable dimensions

Neal Rockwell examines the impact of financialized landlords on the neighbourhoods of Thorncliffe Park, West Lodge Towers and 130 Gowan Avenue in Toronto, as well as Herongate in Ottawa—all areas with large immigrant populations facing gentrification pressures and deteriorating infrastructure. Through a documentary lens, Rockwell captures the resilience of these communities while critiquing the urban development policies that threaten their existence.

Neal Rockwell is a Montréal-based investigative journalist, filmmaker and writer whose photographs, videos and stories have been published in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Al Jazeera and Vice, among others. Recurring themes in his work include the social and political impacts of the housing crisis, environmental issues and how global economics and technology affect local landscapes and communities. He holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University.

Small Village, 1999
Cedar shelves, MDF and millboard
140 cm x 244 cm x 26 cm

On loan from the Canada Council Art Bank

Small Village II, 2004
Cedar shelves, MDF and billboard
30.5 cm x 247 cm x 22 cm

On loan from the Ottawa Art Gallery

Frank Shebageget’s sculptural works Small Village and Small Village II make a powerful commentary on the lasting impact of colonialism on architecture and housing. The standardized “Canadian Indian Home” was a profoundly deficient housing scheme proposed and imposed by the federal government, which affected, and still affects, many Indigenous communities across Turtle Island.

Frank Shebageget is an Anishnabe (Ojibwa) artist and curator born in Upsala, Northwestern Ontario, and currently living in Ottawa. Many of his sculptures and installations reflect his experiences growing up in a remote Indigenous community and feature symbols of cross-cultural contact, such as government-mandated pre-fabricated houses, fishing nets and bush planes. Drawing on the aesthetics of everyday materials, his practice exploits the tense relationships between production, consumption and the economics of beauty through the repetition of forms, labour-intensive processes and the play between quasi-industrial and handcrafted methods. Shebageget’s work has been presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, among other venues.

October 25th + 26th, 1996, 1996
Video, 8 min., black and white, sound

Mattress City, 1997
Video, 8 min., colour and black and white, sound

These two video works are by members of the ad hoc art collectives February and October Groups. Their filmed protest actions in Toronto were in response to the Ontario Conservative government’s “Common Sense Revolution” in the mid-1990s, which featured deep funding cuts to social services, including the cancellation of 200 social housing projects in Ontario.

From 1996 to 2004, Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell collaborated on a number of videos, installations and civic interventions in Toronto as part of the October, February and April Groups. Beyond her work as an artist, filmmaker and curator, Kika Thorne co-founded a feminist cable television collective called SHE/tv in the 1990s, as well as the Anarchist Free Space and Free School in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Adrian Blackwell’s work spans photography, video, sculpture, urban theory and design, and responds to the political and economic forces inscribed in physical spaces. He is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo.

Shelter in Place, 2021
Three-channel HD video installation, 19 min., looped

Courtesy of Andrea Luka Zimmerman + Lux, London

Artist's statement:

Shelter in Place was made during the summer of 2020. Performance artist and musician William Fontaine found himself without a place at the beginning of the first C-19 lockdown. A public park became his shelter. Over the weeks, we both practiced martial arts, and I noticed a community slowly forming around him. This is a portrait of his being in the park, of the park itself, and of those who gathered. Sound and image are out of sync, just as so much of the world was—and is. It is not a documentary of that time, but a document, a witness statement, a poetics of singular presence. I am drawn in my making to lives lived at the edges, even if—and perhaps especially when—those lives are first glimpsed at the “centre” of things, often in the public eye, visible but not seen. This work can only exist because we have public parks (and this especially tolerant park in particular). I met William, who was in the park because he had to be, and also because he could be. Therefore, this is a work made from a necessity, and the meeting in and of a particular place and time. It is a work that becomes about possibility. It believes in how public spaces are the common good of and for all. But it also explores how a falling out of the structures that exist—often ramshackle and excluding—makes another form of survival necessary. William does not fit comfortably into the expectations we have of someone who is without shelter. He struck me as both being entirely here and also elsewhere, in that he was “out of time”—not at the end of things but freed from them. Together we started thinking of how, when we talk about care, we as a society might include those who have no recourse to public funds, including those who are undocumented or have no bank account. How to account for the uncounted? We also thought about journeys in life, how to live and grow and avoid being dependent on the recognition of others, while often needing it for food or protection. We spoke of how proper shelter is about far more than just a structure, about how a space—an actual place, even one without walls—can seed and grow a community, and how rules can unmake such an assembly. We were listening for something, another way of telling—more contemplative and attentive—an allowance just to be, as we are, with each other. How not to be in the present, tense, but simply present.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an award-winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice. Born in Germany in 1969, Zimmerman moved to London in 1991 to pursue PhD studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she currently teaches film. She has directed five feature-length films, including Raskafa, Stories of the Street (2013), Estate, a Reverie (2015), Here for Life (2019) and Wayfaring Stranger (2024), all of which have been screened in cinemas, galleries and festivals around the world. She is the co-founder of two film and cultural collectives, Vision Machine and Fugitive Images, both based in London. In 2020, she received the prestigious Film London Jarman Award in recognition of her work.

Phlocus, aka William Fontaine, is a necromancer of content, soundscapes and performance art. A New York City-born artist now based in London, Phlocus works across disciplines, including music, sculpture, writing and combat arts. He uses cultural, historical and societal information to create time-based performance art that, nomadic at its core, must be “experienced to be translated and manifest.”