Koffler Centre of the Arts

Featuring four artists who engage with elements of fiction to address buried truths - Ivana Dizdar, Rosalie Favell and Anique Jordan, in conversation with moderator Madelyne Beckles.

Join us for a virtual panel discussion in conjunction with our current exhibition, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, through which multidisciplinary artist Carol Sawyer imagines the fictional biography of a 20th century artist, articulating a feminist intervention that disrupts the art history canon. Expanding on critical considerations of history constructs and archival records, History in Remaking features four artists who engage with elements of fiction to address buried truths - Ivana Dizdar, Rosalie Favell and Anique Jordan in conversation with moderator Madelyne Beckles. The panelists will discuss their artistic practices and their own strategies of investigating photography’s documentary role, developing performative personas, and revealing the mechanisms through which histories are recorded or erased.

Watch the talk on YouTube:

The conversation has been transcribed for accessibility purposes. Please click here to view.

About the Panelists

Ivana Dizdar is an artist whose work brings into focus forgotten figures and hidden details—real and imagined. Developed through research and observation, her performance personas double as embodied archives. Her video Ava Zarr plays on the tropes of documentary to recover moments in history that could have been.

Rosalie Favell is a photo-based artist, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Drawing inspiration from her family history and Métis (Cree/English) heritage, she uses a variety of sources, from family albums to popular culture, to present a complex self-portrait of her experiences as a contemporary aboriginal woman. To date Rosalie’s work has explored the relation of photography to issues of identity. Over the course of her long career, she has won prestigious awards such as the Paul DeHuek/Norman Walford Career Achievement Award and the Karsh Award. Numerous institutions have acquired her artwork including the Indigenous Art Centre (Gatineau), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.).

Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images.

Madelyne Beckles is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto. She holds a BFA in Art History and Women’s Studies and now puts her critical faculties to work as a co-host of the podcast High T. Her artwork explores themes of femininity and the body with abject aesthetics and camp humour, which has been shown at MoMA, the AGO, and Miami Art Basel. She is currently the Curatorial Assistant of Youth and Engagement at the AGO.

Images at top: Ivana Dizdar, Rosalie Favell, Anique Jordan (Photo: Liz Ikiriko).