Other Territories

Other Territories brings together five artists from the African and Caribbean diasporas of the Congo, Haiti, Guadeloupe, Cameroon and Nigeria, working in an approach that is both rooted in a sense of belonging to a community, yet liberated from the injunctions of representativeness and fixed representations. Based in Montreal and Toronto, some of them having lived in France before immigrating to Canada, these artists include Marie-José Gustave, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Emmanuel Osahor, Moses Salihou and Michaelle Sergile.

Interlacing, cut-outs and repeated gestures make up works that turn towards various forms of opacity, with the artists clearly seeking to abstract themselves from a weight (that of the direct or deferred impacts of colonialism, displacement, integration, the daily complexity of cultural issues) by immersing themselves in the joy and discipline of a practice that is at once material, ritualistic, political and poetic, in touch with the present but in dialogue with a revisited universal history of the arts.

With its assertive use of black and color, and its hijacking of the perceptions associated with them, the exhibition responds to the challenge launched by the BAND Gallery (Black Artists Networks in Dialogue) by opening up a dialogue between artists from different horizons who meet through their art, and by placing this dialogue at the heart of a space opening up other dialogues: with other African diasporas on French and European soil; with France, but from a French-speaking point of view transformed by the Canadian experience; with a diverse public coming to discover artists who reinforce each other in an unprecedented and astonishing alliance where notions of protection, reparation and proximity emerge through the artistic practices themselves.

Other Territories also addresses issues of exile, displacement and reappropriation through painting, drawing and weaving, using a form of abstract figuration.

On June 7, the Canadian Cultural Centre opens the exhibition as part of Nuit Blanche, in the presence of the artists and the Black Artists Networks in Dialogue Gallery.