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This session is held in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Seminar Room 1, (Room 019)

Led by Alok Vaid-Menon, Barak Ade Soleil and Fallon Simard, presented by Whippersnapper Gallery

Fallon Simard is an Anishinabe artist and filmmaker from Couchiching First Nation, in Treaty #3 Territory. They are a gender non-conforming interdisciplinary artist whose work looks at the intersections of land, extraction, mental health and state violence perpetrated on to Indigenous bodies within a context of colonialism. Barak adé Soleil has charted an expansive career as an artist, independent curator, and consultant, cultivating contemporary art within community. Internationally noted and award-winning, his work draws on traditions of the African diaspora, queerness, postmodernism and disability aesthetics. Barak is currently the Artistic Director of Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto. Alok Vaid-Menon is a trans performance artist with a lot of feelings. Their poetic challenge to the gender binary has been internationally renowned.

What does aesthetics have to do with legibility? What goes into being believed? What are the material benefits of being believable? Join Alok Vaid-Menon, Fallon Simard and Barak adé Soleil in conversation with Whippersnapper Gallery’s Director of Programming Joshua Vettivelu as they explore some of the ways power is bestowed, upheld and named through aesthetic legibility.