Fall 2024 Exhibition Launch at Esker Foundation

Join Esker Foundation to celebrate the fall season opening reception on Friday, September 20, 6-9pm. All welcome.

Candice Lin, La Charada China, 2018. Installation view, Candice Lin: Hospitality for ghosts, 2023. Almeida & Dale, São Paulo. Courtesy of the Artist and Almeida & Dale.

Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour

Curated by Su-Ying Lee

September 21 – December 15, 2024
Talk & Tour by curator Su-Ying Lee: Saturday, September 21, 1-2pm
Esker Foundation, Calgary

Discover & Download: Fall Brochure PDF

Constellations are groups of stars that form conspicuous patterns. Within this exhibition, Constellations is a metaphor for early European colonialism’s configuration of racialization with land and labour. The project of early European colonialism depended upon the invention and inscription of racial categories to justify its methods—non-Europeans being conceived of as lesser humans. Extractive practices implemented by European colonizers dramatically changed the physical landscape of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In tandem, the racialization of colonized peoples was instrumental in enslavement and indenture, cementing anti-Black and other forms of racism. The material and social conditions created by these patterns continues today. Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour brings together work by artists who look at the connected nature of race-making, while also powerfully expressing self-definition, reclamation, agency, and beauty.

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Levin Ifko, Tender To The Flame, 2024. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

Levin Ifko
Tender To The Flame

Until October 20, 2024
In the Project Space

At a time of heightened rhetoric against healthcare access for trans youth, Levin Ifko’s installation Tender To The Flame, highlights expanded notions of what queer and trans healthcare can be, and how our connections with one another can pose a radical shift in how we choose to care for ourselves and those around us.

Contrasting the clinical with the sensual, Ifko utilises personal photography, translucent tapestry, and visible mending. Drawing on their lived experiences accessing healthcare as a trans youth into adulthood, as well as shared knowledge from trans writers, artists, and friends that have guided them along the way, Ifko’s work aims to honour trans livelihood, companionship, and pleasure by addressing community networks of trans protection and care.

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Taiessa, alocasia scalprum, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Manpreet Singh.

Taiessa
variegata

October 28, 2024 – February 2, 2025
In the Project Space

variegata, Taiessa’s ongoing body of work, offers a tangle of plant cuttings that appear to stretch their leaves toward the light in a sun-soaked greenhouse. These plants are crafted from ivory felt, an inert material intended to foil its organic counterpart. Akin to bleached bone, the specific tone of the felt nods to chimeral variegation in a plant’s leaves. This genetic mutation renders a plant unable to uniformly produce chlorophyl – and can also exponentially increase the selling price of a plant cutting.

While plant collection and propagation may seem a benign pastime, variegata points to the linkages between commercial plant collection, sustained colonial extraction, and 21st century capitalism. Modern European botany as a discipline emerged in the 18th century in tandem with the violent colonization of Indigenous communities and lands. Plants were extracted for study and classification, resulting in the erasure of Indigenous knowledges and the destruction of ecosystems. In the present, plant collection has exploded in popularity. With this pointed emphasis on care, reciprocity, and moving with slowness and intention, variegata offers a pathway to imagining possible futures divested from capitalist modes of exchange.

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variegata was produced with support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Edmonton Arts Council.

About Esker Foundation

Founded in May 2012, Esker Foundation owes its vision to its founders, Calgary-based collectors and philanthropists, Jim and Susan Hill, who wanted to create an accessible and welcoming space for people to experience contemporary art exhibitions and programming. An important part of this vision is to ensure that barriers to access are as low as possible. To that end, Esker is proud to offer free admission and free programs.

Through exhibitions, public programs, publishing, and commissioning activities, the Foundation supports artists and audiences through a variety of learning, connecting, and collaborative models. The gallery reflects on current developments in local, regional, and international culture; creates opportunities for public dialogue; and supports the production of groundbreaking new work, ideas, and research.

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: 11am-6pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12-5pm

Accessibility: the gallery is barrier-free.
Find our full accessibility information here.

Admission and Programs are free.

Press Contact:
Jill Henderson, Head of Communications & Marketing
Tel: 403 930 2499
jhenderson@eskerfoundation.com

Press kit & image download.

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