AGO x RBC Emerging Artists Exchange 2023

Patricia Ellah

July 3 - August 1, 2023

Patricia Ellah is a Nigerian Canadian multi-disciplinary artist. Her practice focuses mainly on photography, filmmaking and ceramic sculptural work. Having earned a BFA from Parsons School of design, her work draws inspiration from the African and Caribbean diaspora, a reflection of her family and community. Her work is created as a documentation, a reminder, and a testament to the future and promise of Black people, most especially Black women.

Photograph by Ebti Nabag and Oya Black arts

Patricia Omurulaije Ellah, I feel you, I see you. 2023

The purpose of this research is to inform the artist's ceramic practice. Patricia Ellah will focus on artworks under the purview of the AGO's Department of the Arts of Global African and the Diaspora, including late 19th century and early 20th century West African sculptures. The artist is interested in learning the history of various sculptural pieces. The artist would like to study the shape, form and purpose of these sculptures. What is the value of these sculptures at the time they were created and how did they affect their communities? What is the value of the sculptures now, why are they in diaspora and how are they valuable to institutions and collectors now? The purpose of this research is to find the correlation to African sculptures being created centuries later. Her aim is to find a way forward that represents what the future of African sculptures can look like.

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Gloria Wong

July 17 - August 15, 2023

Gloria Wong (b. 1998) is a visual artist based in “Vancouver”, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish & Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her practice explores the complexities of diasporic identities and how they are shaped by different relationships — whether between people, environments or objects. She is interested in the ways that identity is negotiated through acts of care, memory, and gesture. Wong holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design (2020).

Courtesy of the artist

Wong’s research will focus on the AGO’s Photography collection and programming to investigate the ways in which a “collective memory” is shaped through institutional collections. Drawing on the anthropological photographs of Jacques-Phillipe Potteau and the current Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, Wong will examine how histories are constructed through museum practices. By considering the differences in representation between Potteau’s photographs of Asian and Asian diasporic peoples and Tillmans’ images of his friends, community and collaborators, Wong will trace ideas around the gaze, archive and objectivity in photography. Do these photographs claim to be “authentic” representations of their subjects? How has photography been used to uphold or subvert specific power dynamics or colonial structures? What is the relationship between these historical collections of photography to contemporary arts programming?

Courtesy of the artist

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Yantong Li and Beichen Zhang

August 7 - September 5, 2023

Yantong Li (he/him) and Beichen Zhang (he/him) is a curator and artist duo maneuvering in Toronto/Tkaronto, NYC, and China. Their collaborative works survey the intersection of colonial residues, museum collections, diasporic space and regional politics. Li is an MVS (Curatorial) candidate at University of Toronto. Zhang holds an MFA in Photography and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art in the USA.

Courtesy of the artist

During their residency research mentorship program, Li and Zhang will continue “Unstranded Archive”, a project initiated in 2022 by them to record the embedded histories of Chinese artifact collections in Western museums. Attuned to historiography, they will do a comparative study of a photograph of an execution ground in China dated between 1845-1900, the Chinese artifacts present in the Thomson Collection and the 1851-catalog Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Using the photograph as an active anchor, they seek to query the impact of violent colonial and opium-wars exploitation on the transnational trade of Chinese artifacts; and to critique the discursive formation and streams of knowledge production of early photographs in producing a Eurocentric and imperial archive of history.

Courtesy of the artist

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