There are Times and Places is a virtual project produced and presented by Koffler.Digital, a free online platform and program of the Koffler Centre of the Arts. The project features four original artworks by artists asinnajaq, Dayna Danger, Coco Guzman, Mani Mazinani and Wuulhu, each exploring ways in which the Internet functions (and sometimes fails) as an alternative, digitally constructed space for forming community, expanding identity and knowledge sharing.
There are Times and Places is inspired and informed by recent scholarship that reconsiders traditional ways of viewing and engaging on the Internet. The uncertainty that shrouded the rise of the Internet-age in the mid 1990s, namely the concern surrounding the platform’s anticipated effect on culture, commerce, technology and the various ways societies functioned prompted Metis Cree Canadian film director and writer Loretta Todd to ask “What ideology will have agency in cyberspace?” Two decades later, even as the Internet has become accessible to enormously diverse communities and increasingly representative of those previously denied visible, self-determined communal spaces, it is still unclear what meaning we are able to locate on the web amid ever more present polarities and polemics.
Bringing together artists who examine their own relationship to place, identity and the spaces where these notions intersect, There are Times and Places investigates how we interact socially and intellectually in digitally constructed realities – whether through meme culture, sensory experiences or imagined mythologies – and asks us, what kind of meaning are we able to locate in these sites?
October 2019
Koffler.Digital
Artists: asinnajaq, Dayna Danger, Coco Guzman, Mani Mazinani, Wuulhu
Curator: Letticia Cosbert Miller
Design: Helios Design Labs
asinnajaq
asinnajaq, the daughter of Jobie Weetaluktuk and Carol Rowan, is from Inukjuak, Nunavik and spends most of her time on the unceded Kanien’kéha territory of Tiohtià:ke.
Dayna Danger
Dayna Danger is a visual artist, organizer and drummer. Danger was raised in Treaty 1 territory, homeland of the Metis, or so called Winnipeg. They are currently based in occupied Tio:Tiake/Moonyang, or so called Montreal. Danger holds an MFA in Photography from Concordia University. Through utilizing the processes of photography, sculpture, performance and video, Danger creates works and environments that question the line between empowerment and objectification by claiming the space with their larger than life works.
Coco Guzmán
Coco Guzmán is a Spanish-Canadian queer artist investigating experiences of haunting emerging from systemic political violence. Using mainly drawing and installation, Coco Guzmán’s work aims to embrace stories, mostly of what is not revealed to the eye but lives within our everyday reality as embodied memories or hidden whispers.
Mani Mazinani
Mani Mazinani (b.1984, Tehran) is a Toronto-based artist making installation, video, film, sculpture, photographs, multiples, sound and music. His practice evolved from an early interest in sound recording, now working with the process of translating thoughts into recordings. His visual work thinks about scale and perception, often combining subject matter and medium.
Wuulhu
Wuulhu, otherwise known as Bracken Hanuse Corlett is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. He began working in theatre and performance in 2001 and eventually transitioned towards his current practice that fuses sculpture, painting and drawing with digital-media, audio-visual performance, animation and narrative.