Vince Rozario
Curator | Middlebrook Prize Winners
Toronto, ON, CANADA
Vince Rozario is an curator focusing on issues of decolonizing the canon, multiple modernities, queer diasporas, and transnational futures.
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Biography
Vince Rozario is an independent curator, critic, writer, arts administrator, and community organizer focusing on issues of decolonizing the canon, multiple modernities, queer diasporas, and transnational futures. Their writing deals with issues around community accountability, representation, and equity in the Canadian contemporary art sphere. Their work aims to explore modes of art production and circulation that circumvent traditional modes of exhibition and dissemination.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Community Organization
Canadian Art History
Writing
Curation
Art History
Accomplishments (1)
Recipient: C Magazine New Critics Award
Sept 2018 For an exhibition review of Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti: Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue at Whippersnapper Gallery.
Education (2)
York University: B.A. Honours, Art History
Carleton University: B.A. Honours, Art History 2016
Links (2)
Media Appearances (2)
8 amazing things to see at The Rhubarb Festival in Toronto
Toronto.com online
2019-02-11
Toronto’s DIY art festival for trans and queer Black, Indigenous and people of colour is back for a night of cabaret. It includes queerlesque, comedy, performance art and is hosted by Toronto’s self professed avant-garde slop queen Mikiki Burino. Curators Brock Hessel and Vince Rozario bring you performances by Carolina Brown, Sedina Fiati, Monica Garrido and Coco La Creme.
Grassroots queer arts festival in Toronto aims to create safe spaces
Toronto.com online
2018-07-12
“We wanted to represent a whole spectrum of different voices and communities that generally aren’t as visible, but have been here for decades and have in many ways been the lifeblood of the city’s creative scene,” says Vince Rozario, one of the festival organizers.
Curatorial Projects and Exhibitions (3)
Film Screening: Armchair Politics
2019 Co-curator with Sanjit Dhillon. Emilia-Amalia in collaboration with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (July 4, 2019). Catalogue.
Unvanishing Traces
2018 Group show. Co-curator with Sanjit Dhillon. Xpace Cultural Centre (Oct. 21- Dec 4, 2018). Catalogue.
Sister Co-Resister at Come Up to My Room 2018
2018 Group Installation. Gladstone Hotel (Jan. 18- Jan. 21, 2018). Won Juried Feature Prize. Catalogue.
Articles (6)
Freedom Tube: Lost in X Space.
Xpace Cultural CentreVince Rozario
2020 Freedom Tube: Lost in X Space is constructed as a new-imagining of a pre-existing (and ongoing) conceptual project. Xpace’s Project Space acts as mediated container; moreover a detached and intimate private realm. The drinking straw as everyday artifact, oft passing through most individuals’ lives as an afterthought, is imbued with a coded nuance of resistance to crip communities. In the de-contextualized space of the white cube, the viewer is invited sans interrupting force of public display, to freely explore and interact in any and all manner, including the object’s utilitarian purpose.
Jawa El-Khash: The Upper Side of the Sky
InterAccessVince Rozario
2020 Modernity, ruin, and war are the trinitarian refrain of this age of unprecedented material and ecological destruction. Mediated experiences connect us to the loss of vast swathes of the planet and its history—the Amazon Rainforest and Australian Hinterland consumed by flames—along with centuries of heritage in Iraq and Syria, most notably the Greco-Roman and Semitic ruins of Palmyra. Economic crises of recent decades and the reactionary politics they precipitate have accelerated the generation of ruins at an unprecedented scale. Constantly encountering this destruction through media has induced a collective cognitive hypertrophy. As we struggle to remember what is lost, we encounter our own memories in a state of decay, carrying embodied ruins within us.
Decolonization is Not a Metaphor: The Toronto Biennial Fights its Frame
MomusVince Rozario
2019 The fanfare and the pageantry of press junkets, patrons’ previews, and inaugural performances have long subsided. A reluctant holdout, I belatedly find myself in a dilapidated former formaldehyde factory and Volvo dealership at 259 Lakeshore Boulevard East – the central site of the first Toronto Biennial of Art. My visit comes three days before a federal election that will deliver a Liberal minority government to power, one that is currently fighting a settlement for 102 Indigenous children who died in the child welfare system in northern Ontario, and is headed by a Prime Minister who cannot recall the number of times he’s donned blackface.
The Thread of the Weave: Meaning from Material at Oakville Galleries
MomasVince Rozario
2019 In an era of unprecedented political and ecological crisis, what does it mean for the public when the exhibitionary complex turns its gaze away from their suffering, and toward the travails of inanimate objects? When speaking of subjects – racialized, migrant, incarcerated, and deceased – can an art object operate beyond being a fetish, an essentialized token of a culture, or a didactic representation? Curator Daisy Desrosiers grapples with these questions in Material Tells, a group exhibition featuring the work of eleven internationally-acclaimed artists across the two sites of Oakville Galleries. Simply put, this exhibition straddles the intersection of culture (what matters) and ontology (what constitutes matter). Material Tells foregrounds histories of exploitation inherent in everyday objects, which are predicated on the extraction of raw materials, bodies, and labor from the Global South. It also invites the viewer to situate themselves with these networks of power and seek out their agency.
Deeper Wounds: Nep Sidhu and Aestheticizing Trauma
MomasVince Rozario
2019 To reconstitute memory that has been violently suppressed, we often turn toward the monumental, hoping to fill a discursive void with a profusion of symbols and images. Nep Sidhu’s Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) – which recently closed at Toronto’s Mercer Union, and travels next to Calgary’s Esker Foundation – engages with communal trauma in this mode. Comprising textiles, metalwork, sculpture, sound, and photography, Sidhu’s work steps into the contested terrain of collective memory, and reflects on the 1984 massacres of Sikh people at the hands of the Indian Government. Medicine for a Nightmare attempts to reconstitute an erased history and envision solidarity across gendered, racial, and communal lines. All this in the open and accepting spirit of Sikhism. However, critics from within the community have voiced concerns that the show’s framing references the far-right Khalistani movement: that it simplifies the historical narrative and obfuscates the breadth of violence inflicted by this fringe group.
Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti: Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue
C MagazineVince Rozario
2018 In the warm sunlight of a late summer afternoon, a curious pastel pink tableau – seemingly, a diorama of a suburban living room – occupies a storefront in Toronto’s Chinatown. The stifling heat inside is palpable. Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue delves into mental health, trauma and memory, as experienced through a South Asian diasporic lens, broaching a sensitive discourse on mental health wherein whiteness is often disproportionately centred.
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