This fall, the Art Gallery of York University AGYU welcomes downtown with an exhibition program dedicated to the future of Toronto. Opening Friday, September 15, from 6-9 pm, Migrating the Margins exemplifies the new conditions of artistic production in Toronto reflective of the vast changes in the citys culture as a result of decades of immigration and life in the suburbs. Featuring commissioned artwork by Erika DeFreitas, Anique Jordan, Tau Lewis, Rajni Perera, and Nep Sidhu as well as public artworks by Farrah Miranda, Sister Co-Resister, and Otherness Marilyn Fernandes Pamila Matharu. Migrating the Margins weaves together various lines of contemporary cultural inquiry: immigrant memory; dialogue with place origins through alliances with and allegiances to mothers; traces of Afro-Caribbean and Indian diasporas; the perseverance of Black life and the recovery of forgotten Black histories in Toronto; paeans to working class immigrant life in the suburbs and their burgeoning aesthetics; Brown chic; spirituality and sacrifice.... Migrating the margins to the centre does not mean moving them there, however. It means realizing that the margins, the suburbs, are now the centre.

The exhibition is co-curated by Emelie Chhangur and Philip Monk and continues until December 3, 2017.

Who needs a Performance Bus when you have a subway?! Pfffft.

After 14 years, we retire this chapter of AGYUs Out There programming with REQUIEM FOR COMMUTERS a.k.a. funeral and mega-mass. Presiding over the service is Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas leading Holy Pope of Truth and Bonerkill collective member Kiera Boult. Except Bonerkill doesnt use that name anymore so were having a funeral to retire it, too: a super-funeral! Dont cry just yet both funerals are also celebrations. Get on the LAST-EVER Performance Bus, departing from OCADU 100 McCaul Street on Friday, September 15, at 6 pm sharp and ride into the opening of Migrating the Margins. The free bus returns downtown at 9 pm. P.S. We encourage riders to dress in their Sunday best and remember: the bigger the hair the closer to God as we celebrate THE END.

THE SUBURBS STRIKE BACK!

A weekend of performative discourse in the suburbs.

On Saturday September 16 & Sunday September 17, AGYU plays host to an Ambulatory Symposium of workshops, discussions, and performances. Anchored by Farrah Mirandas Speaking Fruit and Sister Co-Resisters Walking Salon, the weekends activities migrate between the AGYU, Black Creek Community Farm, and Stong Farmhouse to activate the histories and geographies of the Keele Campus. Speaking Fruit is a mobile roadside fruit stand and design studio that feeds the movement for migrant farmworker rights. On September 16 at Black Creek Community Farm, Speaking Fruit brings migrant farmworkers and Indigenous food producers together with artists and community organizers. By eating, drumming, and dancing, we consider what comes out of the soil and how; and by participating in growing practices, we will till the soil of the future. On September 17, in collaboration with Nettie Lambert, Shane Camastro Titiesg Wcinmintwak, Janet Csontos, and Lisa Myers, Sister Co-Resisters Walking Salon works through concepts of belonging, proprietary understandings of land, and Canadas immigrant paradigm and treaty partnership identity. Artists and academics Syrus Marcus Ware and Gloria Swain, from the Faculty of Environmental Studies FES, guide our collective investigations by weaving together a series of interruptions that do not underestimate the divisive lines that suburban boundaries can create and that normalizing notions of belonging can maintain. Suburban Hospitality is co-presented with FES and programmed by Suzanne Carte, Emelie Chhangur, Lisa Myers, and Honor Ford-Smith.

Othering AGYU Vitrines

An AGYU commissioned, site-specific work by Otherness Marilyn Fernandes Pamila Matharu borrows from the conventions of advertising and the rhetoric of multiculturalism to turn AGYU Vitrines into lightboxes that frame education as a primary tool of colonial story telling. A montage of text, found images, and narrative taken from a discarded social science textbook entitled The People We Are: Canadas Multicultural Society Gage, 1980, Taking a page... questions the Canadian immigrant paradigm by offering up a historiographical lesson on notions of belongingness.

Audio Out comes inside!

Audio Out, AGYUs listening post, once located outside the gallerys front doors, is now a listening benchlocated in our newly re-designed lobby! Next years program is guest curated by Darren Copeland of NAISA. First up is The City September 15 October 22, a tour of Kolkota by Debashis Sinha, but a view from the cosmopolitan version of Toronto. Following October 23 December 3, is a radiophonic piece by Parisa Sabet entitled Visiting Grandpa.