GUT_BRAIN is an exhibition series inspired by the primary movements of the digestive system: ingestion, propulsion, mechanical breakdown, chemical digestion, absorption, and elimination.

As earth’s metabolic rhythms have been made to converge with anthropocentric needs and desires, the nutrient cycling process has been disrupted, leading to environmental catastrophe. Our bodies-minds are mirroring what is happening in nature: environmental devastation is reflected in our diminishing microbiomes creating an epidemic of inflammatory diseases. We remain mirrors of the natural world: or rather, of the modified versions that we ourselves have created. Part of the devastation is related to the 20th Century war against bacteria and microbes for which antibiotics and pesticides were invented, a mission intrinsically linked to colonialism’s desire to modernize, valorize, and purify. In this context, we must bear in mind that our condition is currently that of ‘posthumans’: forever chemicals, pesticides, plastics are part of our bodies now as much as of our ecosystems. How can we conceive of possible futures considering the inevitable and lethal fusion of the technosphere and the biosphere? How are artists imagining epistemological breaks towards possible futures?

Connecting artists, scholars, and activists from across the Americas and beyond, GUT_BRAIN will acknowledge injurious forms of interdependency and imagines desiring differently: micro and planetary eroticism, making kin, holistic health, community-organized stewardship, and an erasure of the categorical distinctions between humans, animals, systems, seeds, plants, bodies of water, and bacteria.

The first movement, Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess, materializes at the mouth. The mouth tracks the destinies of excess: the origins and symptoms of injurious forms of interdependency that have led to our toxic world. This two-part movement focuses on artists who recognize that modern technologies at the centre of a project of future worldmaking are linked to destructive desires, toxic masculinity, feminicide, dependency on fossil fuels, land dispossession, chemical contamination, remaindered and redundant populations, necropower, and the colonial technosphere to sustain life. The exhibition moves from injury to potential, from predation and separation to symbiosis, from damage to possible futures.

Tania Candiani’s three-channel film features an all-female choir reciting sounds associated with the major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—metal casting, meatpacking, printing, and woodworking—drawing a link between bodies and machines; Daniela Ortiz’s installation pictures a harsh denunciation of the exploitation and invisibilization of racialized domestic workers in Peru; Joseph Tisiga’s grid of artificial turf covered panels laden with plaster cast cigarette butts grapples with reconciling the present with the past; Miguel Calderón’s exploration of a real life character and his symbiotic relationship with a peregrine falcon evokes masculinity, predation, and Western human-animal relations.

Couzyn van Heuvelen’s Nitsiit (“hooks'' in Inuktitut) is an installation consisting of seven human-sized fishing lures, each meticulously crafted in steel, clay, aluminum, and wood. Conceived by van Heuvelen as part of his ongoing exploration of personal narratives and experiences, these deceptively simple objects hold within them a vast cosmology of land-based practices and culture. Based in survival, Nitsiit not only speaks to contemporary fishing practices and the importance of sustenance practices, but also the crucial role they play in self-determination and Indigenous food sovereignty. Presented at UTM in a food court fuelled by industrial food processes alludes to the lure of modernization, a central theme in the first movement of GUT_BRAIN.

Mónica Arreola, Adrián Balseca, Gauri Gill, Yoshua Okón

Serving as a counterpart to the exhibitions in the Blackwood galleries, Lightbox Cycle 1 takes up the desire for excess and modernization in four images. Gauri Gill’s portrait of a merchant serpent sets the stage for critical discourse, it asks: How do the deities and idols of our times manifest themselves? What diverse modes of worship and sacrifice do these entities or constructs demand? And what narratives or myths do they generate, reinvent, and sustain? This chain of inquiries is further explored and expanded in the works of Mónica Arreola, Yoshua Okón, and Adrián Balseca. Arreola’s documentation of abandoned housing developments on the outskirts of Tijuana reveals the hollow assurances of capital accumulation and real estate speculation. Okón’s uncanny image of manufactured laughter produced by former maquiladoras workers (sweatshops in Northern Mexican border cities) lays bare the brutality of mechanized labour and consumer culture. While Balseca’s deceptively alluring depiction of global commodities in the form of festive fuel-filled jerry cans critiques the often-concealed costs of progress in paradisiacal lands ravaged by extractivism. Punctuated throughout this image set is the underlying violence of global capitalism and the enduring repercussions of colonization.

Rebecca Belmore, Tania Candiani, Regina José Galindo, Laureana Toledo

Lightbox Cycle 2 focuses on the convergence of modernization, toxic masculinity, femicide, remaindered life, and other forms of destructive desires rooted in necropower. Tania Candiani’s Four Industries brings attention to the often-overlooked role of women in America’s industrial revolution and the inherent contradictions within progress-oriented narratives; her corresponding musical scores poignantly capture the detailed sights and sounds of mechanized violence and states of exception that arise from industrialization including meatpacking. Similarly, Laureana Toledo reveals the illusions of progress by pairing archival images of colonial engineering projects, like the Trans-Isthmus Railroad, with the Isthmus Zapotec words of poet Irma Pineda, which recount the violation of Indigenous women in rural Veracruz. Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s Fringe also grapples with the violence inflicted upon Indigenous women’s bodies but fundamentally carries a message of healing, resistance, and resilience. Lastly, Regina José Galindo’s unsettling performance for camera, depicting herself fleeing from an armoured vehicle until exhaustion is both an act of solidarity with the women whose voices remain unheard and a means to expose the ways in which art, war, and the global market are intertwined.

Saturday October 7, 2023, 12–4pm
Small World Music Centre, 180 Shaw St, Toronto

Ignacio Acosta, Adrián Balseca, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Patricia Domínguez, Regina José Galindo, Tala Madani, Marisa Morán Jahn, Yoshua Okón, Teresa Serrano, Laureana Toledo, Alberta Whittle, Miguel Ventura

This program of short videos by twelve artists explores Destructive Desires and their effects: extractivist capitalism, feminicide, remaindered populations, labour rights, the fallen dreams of modernization, metabolic rifts, penetrative potency, acts of bodily sovereignty, and healing rituals.

Saturday, February 17, 2024, 12–4pm
Small World Music Centre, 180 Shaw St, Toronto

Patricia Domínguez, Duke & Battersby, Miriam Simun, Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Tania Willard, Dafna Maimon, Mika Rottenberg, Tejal Shah, Alberta Whittle

This video program speculates on Other Destinies of Excess: practices of world-making in the face of dire ecological and existential threats including waste, extinction, toxic drug supply, racism, and colonialism.