Art Metropole

#16139

Future Diasporas: Culture, Art, Identity, Space: & Toronto's Unaffordable Urban Landscape

Alycia Shanika

Date

2024

Publisher

Alycia Shanika

Format

Artists' Books

Size

19.1 × 24.5 × 1.1 cm

Length

162 pp

Genre

Social Practice, Arts Writing, Asian Art & Artists, Canadian, Disability and Chronic I, Feminist Theory, Queer Art & Artists, Architecture, Design, Tkaronto/Toronto

Description

Alycia Shanika’s publication “Future Diasporas: Culture, Art, Identity, Space” celebrates the stories of racialized diasporic artists as they reconcile with their past, negotiate the present amid Tkaronto/Toronto’s unaffordable urban landscape, and make space for just and flourishing futures.

Featuring conversations and artwork by eight racialized diasporic artists, Future Diasporas shares artists’ stories about their diasporic identities, ancestral histories, commemorative art practices, migratory patterns, and displacement. The artists also share stories about their experiences in Toronto—from facing institutional racism and tokenism, to precarious gigs, and displacement from community cultural spaces such as 888 Dupont, 187 Augusta, and Hearth. The stories disentangle the shifting challenges, needs, desires and future possibilities of cultural spaces in this unaffordable landscape.

Two visions, each with three actionable recommendations, provide generative ideas for building supportive systems and making space for generations to come. Overall, Future Diasporas calls for a cultural shift that is centred on understanding the past, building collective agency in the present, and re-imagining the future diasporas.

Author-Curator: Alycia Shanika Doering
Cover & Contributing Artist: Bianca Weeko Martin
Contributing Artists: Waard Ward, Mirusha Yogarajah, Philip Leonard Ocampo, Jana Ghalayini, Hima Batavia, Tamara “Solem” Al-Issa, & Cathleen Calica

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