Community Artist in Residence

The Varley Art Gallery of Markham announces multi-disciplinary artist, Golboo Amani, as its 2019 Community Artist in Residence.

The Community Artist in Residence is a yearlong program that invites professional artists with socially engaged practices to help develop, organize, and deliver a minimum of three original and innovative programs based on the exhibitions on view at the gallery. Programs can include workshops, talks, performances, lectures, interventions, guided tours and outreach initiatives. Stay in touch for more information.

Artist Biography

Multi-disciplinary artist Golboo Amani is best known for her performance and social practice works. Amani utilizes familiar social engagements and patterns of performativity as ready-made sites for aesthetic intervention and critical engagement. The artist’s work often addresses the conditions of knowledge production that render epistemic violence as invisible, insignificant and benign. Much of her work focuses on interventions or alternatives to formal sites of pedagogy to include forms, contexts and content normally excluded from institutionalized knowledge production. By expanding sites of pedagogy to include the streets, backyards, homes, public transit, Amani intends to produce non-hierarchical pedagogical experiences that speak to collective age

ncy and egalitarian epistemology. Such principles are present in her innovative Unsettling Settlers: Intervention Game, a social practice work and artist multiple.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including the Art Gallery of York University, Creative Time Summit, Art Gallery of Ontario, Articule, XPACE Artist-Run Centre, Encuentro: Hemispheric Institute, Union Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Rats9 Gallery, Rhubarb Festival, FADO Emerging Artist Series, TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City), 221A Artist-Run Centre, and the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art.  Amani is also recognized for her curatorial work in Toronto Performance Art Collective’s 7a*md8 and the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art as well as Whippersnapper’s first Sidewalk Screenings series.

Associated programs and events

School of Bartered Knowledge (Unionville Festival, June 1 – 2, 2019)

The School of Bartered Knowledge is a site-specific durational performance/installation that utilizes an open-ended framework for the circulation of knowledge and information.

Public Reading (York Regional Transit buses, September 9, 3:00 – 6:00 p.m. and September 21, 12:00 – 3:00 p.m.)

Public Reading is a participatory performance work that engages with audiences in a street level public experience.

Age, Ableism and Art Panel Discussion (October 19, 2019, 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.)

A one hour tour and performance in the gallery will be followed by a casual round table discussion.

Photo Top: Manolo Lugo

Photo Bottom: Shannon Cochrane