Keynote Address, Black Portraiture[s]: Toronto, Absent/ed Presence 

Join us for a very special keynote address by M. NourbeSe Philip to open Black Portraiture[s]: Toronto, Absent/ed Presence, a three-day conference exploring Blackness as absent/ed presence in art, art history,  performance, archives, museums, cultural production and technology. Following the keynote, M. NourbeSe Philip will be in conversation with DJ and curator Mark Campbell.

Black Portraiture[s]: Toronto, Absent/ed Presence will take place virtually in partnership with Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University and is presented by Wedge Curatorial Projects. All are welcome, from wherever you are in the world! 

Born in Tobago, M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto where she practised law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer.  Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, Coups and Calypsos, and four collections of essays including her most recent collection, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Zong! was named the 2021 winner of World Literature Today’s (WLT) 21 Books for the 21st Century.  M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She is also the 2021 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ lifetime achievement award, the Molson Prize, for her “invaluable contributions to literature".

Mark V. Campbell is the founder of Northside Hip Hop Archive and has spent two decades embedded within the Toronto hip hop scene operating from community engaged praxis as both a DJ and Curator. He has curated several exhibitions of archival items and artistic works related to Canadian hip hop, including the T-Dot Pioneers Trilogy, Mixtapes: Hip-Hop’s Lost Archive, ...Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto hip hop Culture from Analogue to Digital as part of the 2018 CONTACT Festival exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, as well as For the Record--An Idea of the North at the TD Gallery in Toronto. His forthcoming exhibition, Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival of Hip-Hop’s Visual Art is set to launch at Âjagemô Gallery in Ottawa, January 2022. Mark is Assistant Professor of Music and Culture at the University of Toronto Scarborough.