How it Feels

Artist: Erika DeFreitas, Faye Mullen Tabita Rezaire Fannie Sosa
Opening: Thursday September 10th, noon - 7:00 pm
Exhibition: September 10 - October 3, 2020
📍: 1305 Pine Avenue West, Montreal

Projet Pangée is thrilled to present How it Feels, a video-projection uniting the powerful works of Erika DeFreitas, Faye Mullen, Tabita Rezaire, and Fannie Sosa. Through their engaged videos and practices, the artists highlight various contrasted gestures that put forward the inherent potential for healing and resistance. The upbeat video works titled I need this in my life by Fannie Sosa and Premium Connect by Tabita Rezaire explore the dynamic connections between organic, orgasmic, technological, scientific and spiritual systems. Through an addictive stream of found and filmed videos, Sosa and Rezaire tackle the prevailing structure of racism that permeates our society and invite the viewer to reconsider the politics of our bodies by decentering occidental authority and to find root in spirituality and pleasure.

Faye Mullen and Erika DeFreitas, on the other hand, boil down their gestures into one essential act. Both videos, forgive me for speaking in my own tongue/to practice the study of breathing by DeFreitas and Disappearance in Prose by Mullen, are centered around the notion of breathing. Through the matter-of-fact presence of DeFreitas and hence the one of those within marginalized communities, the artist questions their ability, choice and will to breathe, confronting us to the ongoing presence of systemic inequality. In Mullen’s time-based video performance from 2012, breathing has been divided into an inhale followed by a muted scream. By embodying silence itself, Mullen considers their Anishinaabe roots and the notions of imposed and resisted language. In choosing silence, their approach is to explore how contemplative gestures can become a powerful political tool.

How it Feels is part of BOILING POINT: a collective of BIPOC artists and thinkers based in Tiohtià:ke [Montreal]. As the element of water mutates matter, what was once stagnant escapes into its surroundings. Our social climate has reached a state where internal structures call for drastic transformation. Boiling Point aims to reshape the relationship between artist and space by addressing the artistic needs present within BIPOC and LGBTQ multiplicity. Projet Pangée would like to thank Sabrina Jolicoeur, Tyrone Palmer, and the whole team for their vision and for organizing the event. Click here to learn more about this essential event and other participating galleries

Biographies

Erika DeFreitas is a Guyanese and Trinidadian artist who lives and works in Scarborough. Guided by a conceptual approach, she explores the influence of language, loss and culture on the formation of identity with public interventions, textile-based works, and performative actions that are photographed. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, she works through attempts to understand concepts of loss, post-memory, inheritance, and objecthood.

Faye Mullen situates their practice in and alongside the community of Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal as Oshkaabewis, Ie’nikónirare, sister, auntie, earthworker, and art maker navigating efforts to lift the Voices of kin, bridge understandings, and honour Silences. Through a 2Spirit/ Queer mixed Indigenous (Anishinaabe/ Algonquin/ Irish/ Italian) perspective, their practice reaches toward horizontality worlding queer imaginings and decolonial ways of being. They work through gesture in a variety of media including site-specific interventions, sound installations, and both moving and still image-making.

Tabita Rezaire is based is a Paris-born Guyanese artist based in Cayenne, French Guyana. Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Inspired by quantum and cosmic mechanics, Rezaire’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions of connection and emancipation.

Fannie Sosa is an afro-sudaka activist, artist, and curandera, currently doing a France-Brasil co-directed PhD called Twerk/Torque: Anti Colonial Strategies for Thriving and Surviving in Web 2.0 Times. She creates mixed media knowledge packages that span performance, video installations, circular talks, extended workshops, using pleasure and its transmission as a radical act of resistance for an embodied afro-diasporic evolutionary praxis.