About
THE COUNTER/SELF exhibition investigates artistic strategies of creating alter-egos to challenge hegemonic discourse and ingrained oppressive attitudes. Highlighting diasporic perspectives and counteracting socio-political constraints, these personas articulate forms of resistance or propose alternative ways of defining one’s self free of gender normative, geopolitical, or colonial impositions, constructing new narrative potentialities. In an informal tour of the exhibition, Helio Eudoro, Julius Poncelet Manapul, and Sasha Shevchenko will discuss the ways in which they position themselves in relation, confrontation, or opposition to dominant mind frames through their stand-ins and characters. Moderated by Mona Filip.
This event is free and is open to the public.
Artists
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Helio Eudoro
Helio Eudoro is a Brazilian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto who explores themes of identity, gender, sexuality, diaspora, and aging, and how these topics intersect. His practice examines the cycle of mindless ownership, exploring the connections between possessions, mass production, authorship, fast-fashion, fast-furniture, wish-cycling, and waste. He seeks to create dialogues that challenge our understanding of material systems and how they shape our consumption and disposal habits. He holds a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University in Toronto, and he is the recipient of several grants and awards. He has also exhibited his work in galleries and museums across Canada and Brazil.
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Julius Poncelet Manapul
Julius Poncelet Manapul (Manila, Philippines 1980) immigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1990. They attained their BFA at OCAD University, their Masters of Visual Studies at University of Toronto, along with their Sexual Diversity Studies Ressearch from University of Toronto. Their work has been presented in London, Paris, Berlin, and the US, in Canada at Koffler Gallery, University of Waterloo Gallery, Art Museum at the U of T, John B. Aird Gallery, A Space Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and as part of Toronto Nuit Blanche, Toronto World Pride, Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival, Toronto Queer Film Festival, and Outsider Fest Austin Texas. Manapul’s work has also been featured on CBC Arts Television Network, and has been written about in academic articles in Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol.19 #3, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Vol.1 & Vol.7, Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries.”
Through a research-based art practice, Manapul examines displacement, complicated by colonialism, sexual identity, diasporic bodies, global identity construction, homonormativity, homonationalism, and the Eurocentric Western hegemony. Excavating their experience of immigration and assimilation through cultural erasure, Manapul’s research looks at the eternal nomadic embodiment for many migrant queer Filipinx that create unattainable imagined spaces of lost countries and domestic belongings through globalized colonial pedagogy and imperial power.
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Sasha Shevchenko
Sasha Shevchenko is a Ukrainian, Tkaronto/Toronto based multidisciplinary artist. Inspired by her experience as a Ukrainian immigrant, she bridges interests in sculpture, textile, archaeology, and intimate ethnography. Through contemporary and ancient story-telling methods, Shevchenko creates evocative installations where tradition, resistance, and identity have the space to whimsically extend into cultural futures.