Ban’ yuh belly

Thursday May 9,
7pm - 9pm

Hold: Part 1
A conversation between artist Anique Jordan and activist Tina Garnett on the refusal of sense-making

Thursday May 23,
7pm - 9pm

Hold: Part 2
A conversation between artist Anique Jordan and journalist Priya Ramanujam on media, youth and relationships that carry memory.

Ban’ yuh belly is a series centering on the grief, anger and mental health of loved ones who are mourning those they have lost due to violence – systemic or otherwise. The works attempt to disturb the normalcy through which Black lives are violently taken and interrupted. Through a localized historical lens, Anique Jordan has created new work to contend with the survival strategies used to make sense of the senseless.

Employing a Trinidadian expression meaning to hold onto something, Jordan uses the phrase Ban’ yuh belly to visualize the ways we cope with violence. How do we make sense of this? What do we hold onto? Ban’ yuh belly is in part inspired by Aereile Jackson, a Black woman interviewed in the film The Forgotten Space – A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea (2010) and discussed in scholar Christina Sharpe’s text In the Wake. In the film, Aereile Jackson is seen holding several dolls which she explains, she is holding onto because they are the only things that remind her of her children. She says, “don’t think I’m mentally ill or anything like that…I’ve lost a lot. I’m trying…I’m hurt”.

Jordan’s practice works with the spaces between historical archive, speculative futures and what she sees every day. Her work sources pathways to understand how and where on our bodies our histories live. It is an obsession with what she calls, a haunting. Over the past four years, Jordan’s work has contended with these questions, trying make sense of the role it plays in our lives. It is a question she continues to ask of Black bodies, but more deliberately, of Black women and is the starting point to much of her work.

Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. Jordan has lectured on her artistic and community engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As an artist, she has exhibited in galleries such as Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Art Gallery of Guelph, Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Wedge Collection, Art Gallery of Windsor, Gallery 44, and Y+ Contemporary. She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships and in 2017 was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year award. This past year, Jordan completed a residency at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago), was the 2018-19 Artist-in-Residence at Osgoode Hall Law School and the most recent recipient of the Hnatyshyn Emerging Artist award. Her work appears in public and private collections nationally.

Presented in collaboration with Zalucky Contemporary, Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, and CUPE Ontario.

Zalucky Contemporary

3044 Dundas St. W.
Toronto, ON, M6P 1Z3