Multi-disciplinary artist Kama La Mackerel is one of many creators who has had projects interrupted and redirected by the global pandemic. Join Kama in a conversation with the AGO’s Adam Levine about their life and work in quarantine, and looking at colonial past and present to build radical queer futures.   

Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial practice through cultural production. Kama has exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. They have lived in far-flung places such as Pune, India and Peterborough, Ontario. ZOM-FAM, their debut poetry collection is published by Metonymy Press. lamackerel.net @KamaLaMackerel

Prior to becoming Assistant Curator of European Art in 2020, Adam Harris Levine held various curatorial roles at the AGO and conducted extensive work with the Thomson Collection of European Art. He is currently finalizing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, where he has also taught extensively. Levine’s area of specialty is medieval and renaissance sculpture and decorative arts.