Kinesthesia: Body as Form

This exhibition highlights a vital current in contemporary artmaking today: the intersection between visual art and dance. Named for the process whereby a body comes into awareness of itself in space, Kinesthesia brings together an eclectic gathering of artists and groups whose respective practices acknowledge and celebrate the human body’s many ways of being in movement.

Kinesthesia includes visual artists, choreographers, dance collectives, and other performers from across the worlds of dance and art in Canada. Throughout their respective practices, visitors will experience extraordinary artworks that foreground the unique wisdom of bodily experience. The exhibition includes a vibrant variety of media, including sculpture, painting, textile, photography, film, and virtual reality. Combined, the array of work on display reflects ongoing conversations in the fields of dance and live artmaking, speaking to critical topics such as embodiment, choreography, healing, ritual, performance, and transcendence. Drawn from across the country, selected artists include All Bodies Dance, ĀNANDAM dance theatre, Justine A. Chambers, Fran Chudnoff, Brendan Fernandes, Ronald Li, Tanya Linklater, Lucy M. May, Dana Michel, Maisie O’Brien, Evann Siebens, and Sarah Nash Wong.

In all of their work, these artists, dancers, and performers present powerful models for the ways that a human body can present itself in space, whether as the grieving embodiment of inherited trauma, or the wisdom of healing; as an expression of the ways a body can query the paradigms of public space, and unpack their unspoken logics; as sites for both the enactment and subversion of choreographed movement; or as the presentation of alternative modes of identity. Dance relentlessly proposes and then enacts its own possibilities, in movement.

Along with objects and installations, Kinesthesia features a series of live performance works. These include an excerpt from Montreal-based choreographer Lucy M. May’s The Conditions; a dance battle with Funk’N’Sole Street Dance Society; an interpretation of Toronto-based ĀNANDAM dance theatre’s Ephemeral Artifacts sculptural installation; a staging of Vancouver and Surrey-based Justine A. Chambers’ and Simran Sachar’s Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai; and a rendition of Montreal-based live artist Dana Michel’s durational work MIKE. For more details about these performances, visit our Events section.