Burnt Sugar

Adama Delphine Fawundu, Sea Whispers for Mami Wata at the shore of Guanahani, 2022

Burnt Sugar

Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shaya Ishaq, Bushra Junaid, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Oluseye
Curated by francesca ekwuyasi

On view September 27 – November 16, 2024
Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC), Toronto

Opening Friday, September 27, 2024: Join us at 6pm for a walkthrough with the Curator + Artists followed by a celebratory reception.

Critical Distance is pleased to present Burnt Sugar, curated by noted author francesca ekwuyasi and featuring new and recent works by Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shaya Ishaq, Bushra Junaid, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Oluseye. Drawing upon the artists’ longstanding engagement with themes of migration, identity, Blackness, and diaspora, Burnt Sugar explores the inextricable connections between labour, extraction and sugar production including the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlives. As a writer’s experiment in storytelling through the group exhibition format, the exhibition contends with sugar as both matter and metaphor, probing the intertwined histories of sugar from multiple artistic angles, yet with a clear curatorial focus and the skills, practices, and self-preservation strategies that enslaved people and their descendants maintained through their migrations, forced and otherwise.

This exhibition was developed through the Ways of Attuning curatorial study group facilitated by WaveForm Collective (Liz Ikiriko and Toleen Touq).

About the Curator

francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist, and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. Her novel was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the DUBLIN Literary Award. francesca has participated in residencies at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, ARTEXTE, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Centre for Arts Tapes. She has been a writer in residence at Queens University and the University of Winnipeg. francesca’s art, short films, and writing have been shown and screened at Hermes Gallery. Nocturne Halifax, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Black Film Fest, DRIFF, and elsewhere.

About the Artists

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist born in Brooklyn, NY, the ancestral space of the Lenni-Lanape. She is a descendant of the Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi peoples, and her distinct visual language centers indigenization and the power in ancestral knowledge and memory through photography, printmaking, video, sound, and assemblage. Fawundu is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University and co-publisher of the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and her works are in the collections at the Newark Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art, amongst other private and public collections.

Shaya Ishaq is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer whose research interests are engaged in craft, diaspora, design anthropology, and (afro)futurism. Devoted to materiality, she works with textiles and clay to create wearable art, jewelry, and installations. Ishaq is interested in the liminality of rites of passages and explores this through meditative processes such as weaving, felting, and hand-built ceramics. She has studied Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University and has previously attended Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. In 2023 Ishaq received the Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

Bushra Junaid is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, author, and arts administrator based in Toronto. Born in Montreal to Nigerian and Jamaican parents, and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Junaid is best known for exploring history, memory, cultural identity, and placemaking through mixed media collage, drawing, and painting. Reflecting on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” and John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), Junaid’s landmark curatorial project, What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic was presented at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in 2020. As an artist she has exhibited across Canada and the US, with work held in public, private and corporate collections.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-born conceptual artist and writer. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics ranging from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. Nnebe’s work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada and internationally. She is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria; and was one of two inaugural artists for NLS Kingston’s Sustainable Sculpture Residency in Maroon Town, Jamaica. In 2025, Nnebe will be participating in a year-long residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands.

Oluseye is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. Using “diasporic debris”—a term he coined to describe artifacts he collects on his trans-Atlantic travels—he traces Blackness through its multifaceted manifestations. Recast into sculpture, performance, and photography, these transformational objects invoke his personal narratives within a broader examination of Black and Diasporic identity, migration, and African spiritual traditions. Oluseye has exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Fransisco, 2024), Daniel Faria Gallery (Toronto, 2024), Southern Guild Gallery (Cape Town, 2023), and the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, 2023), among others. His first public art commission, Black Ark, was installed in Toronto’s Ashbridge’s Bay Park, and will tour the Maritimes with stops at the Owens Art Gallery and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia through 2024.

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Location and Access Info

Critical Distance is located in Suite 122 on the ground floor at 401 Richmond Street West, a wheelchair accessible building with ramps at both Richmond Street doors, and an accessible washroom on every level. The gallery is equipped with automatic doors, exhibitions are designed with mobility in mind, and we commission audio description for all core programs. Updates on any additional measures we develop in relation to specific artworks or events will be posted as it becomes available. For any questions or more information, please contact us at info@criticaldistance.ca.

Thank you to our funders

Burnt Sugar is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. Critical Distance gratefully acknowledges operating support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

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