November 11, 2022

Black Ecologies

Session 2

Sycorax scene

Photo courtesy of Charmaine Lurch

Overview

Artists Charmaine Lurch and Jérôme Havre join writer and researcher Nehal El-Hadi for a provocative discussion on nature, mythology and Blackness. Drawing from the artists’ sculptural engagements with environments and their manipulations, this conversation will explore what it means to contend with our current moment through human-environment interactions, desires, and fantasies. 

About Jérôme Havre

Jérôme Havre is a Toronto and Marseille based artist whose practice concentrates on issues of identity, communities and territories and the investigation of contemporary life’s political and sociological processes as they relate to nationalism. 

Havre adopts a multidisciplinary approach in his exploration of these themes and their attending questions. He uses myriad tools and methods to make tangible the conditions of identity within situations of social transformation. For Havre, the use of a technological process is not only to accomplish a specific task but a necessary form of expression in and of itself. He has been awarded several grants from the Canada Arts Council, the Quebec Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council and he received a travel grant for Germany, Spain, the United States and Martinique. Havre completed his graduate studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 2001 he has exhibited his works in Europe, Africa and North America.  

About Charmaine Lurch

Charmaine Lurch is a multidisciplinary artist whose painting, sculpture and social engagement reveal the intricacies and complexities of the relationships between us and our environments. Her sculptures, installations and interventions contend with explorations of space and time and invite analysis into overwhelmingly complex and urgent racial, ecological and historical reckonings.  

Lurch has exhibited throughout Canada and beyond, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Massillon Museum in Ohio, the National Gallery of Jamaica and a virtual exhibition at WEAD/Platform 3 in Tehran, Iran. Lurch’s works have been acquired by several institutions and private collectors including Global Affairs Canada, who has shown her work in EXPO 2021 held in Dubai and Canadian embassies and consulates globally. 

About Nehal El-Hadi – Moderator

Nehal El-Hadi is a journalist, editor and researcher whose work investigates the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual) and technology (internet, health). Her hybrid digital/material research methods are informed by her training and experience as a science and environmental journalist. El-Hadi is Science and Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada, an academic news site, and Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine, a biannual print publication dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design.  

Access Info

If you require wheelchair or accessible seating, please contact our Box Office ahead of time at tickets@harbourfrontcentre.com or phone (416) 973-4000, Option 1 – Wednesday–Friday from 1-5pm.

Dates & Times

November 11
2:50pm – 4:05pm

Venue

Fleck Dance Theatre in Queen's Quay Terminal

207 Queens Quay West

3rd Floor

Follow signs and take escalator or elevator

Toronto, ON M5J 1A7
Canada

Google Map

Price

Purchase of 1 symposium pass gives you access to all Shifting Ground Symposium events over the 2 day period.

Keywords Public ArtTalk