Emelie Chhangur, Director Curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre talks with Qanita Lilla about her radical curatorial practice. Growing up in Paris, Ontario in an assimilationist paradigm, she talks of harnessing experimentation and rejecting the confines of the status quo. Emelie’s lived experience of cultural mixing and of negotiating multiple worlds allows her to open up curatorial practice to non-Western traditions but also to bring together forms that might not have a natural affinity. She describes her practice as scrappy, experimental and unexpected worldmaking that started in a bright yellow kitchen.

Show notes: https://bit.ly/3CU6Znk

Transcript: https://bit.ly/3kiWzaw

With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.

Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021.

The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez.

The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

In artist Rajni Parera’s marbled landscapes, mutant travellers traverse interstellar terrains as regal environmental combatants. Hers is a multiverse of jewel-coloured intensity, of hairy spoons and delicate seed pods all of whom co-exist as equals in a realm where only the gentle survive. Which life events birthed these ideas and which everyday materialities were harnessed to propel Rajni’s practice ‘to infinity and beyond’?

Show notes: https://bit.ly/3QKKxmv

Transcript: https://bit.ly/3ZGpOnT

With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.

Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021.

The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez.

The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

For poet Juliane Okot Bitek storytelling was always in the air. In this episode, she shares with Qanita Lilla that stories have the power to transform who we are and how we situate ourselves in the world. Juliane describes the precarity of belonging, the unexpected joys of ‘unsettlement’, intergenerational memory (contained in the beauty of Acholi mosquito ‘nests’) as new modalities through which to navigate the past. These things and more shape a world where the ghost of Joseph Conrad is finally exorcised and a glorious, wild apparition of a woman without language is conjured in his place. She lives in the gaps on Juliane’s page, slides off the run-on lines and sits between the repetitions, only to emerge with her back turned as she walks into the crowd.

Show notes: https://bit.ly/3kpJJqQ

Transcript: https://bit.ly/3Xhua38

With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.

Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021.

The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez.

The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.