Anique Jordan these times, 2019
Presented as a billboard on The Power Plant’s south façade, these times, 2019, by Tkaronto-based artist Anique Jordan, explores how the violence inherent within historical archives can affect people. The work is an extension of the 2023 exhibition in parallel, featuring Jordan and artists Rouzbeh Akhbari, Joi T. Arcand, Aylan Couchie, Simon Fuh, and Julia Rose Sutherland, whose practices reclaim their communities’ narratives, despite colonialism’s persistence.
The artists featured in in parallel seek to reconnect with the obscured parts of their histories, reflecting an urgency to preserve connections to lands, peoples, and ways of living that shape them. Together, their works trace relations that exist between communities that, like parallels, perhaps never meet, yet share creative approaches to evading the confines of colonialism.
Jordan’s these times, 2019 is part of her series Ban’ yuh belly, in which the artist explores the physical and emotional harm that the violence within archives and social infrastructures causes. In the photograph presented, a woman lies in bed with her back turned, granting herself a moment of mourning and rest. Reflecting Jordan’s experiences examining archives across Toronto, the work portrays the exhaustion that emerges when processing what archives hold, especially when they deny the existence of oppressive realities and erase lives and kinships from official documents. Our observation of this intimate moment emphasizes the burden of witnessing. Still, the artist amplifies a widely shared experience while resisting erasure.
Read more about the exhibition In Parallel, at The Power Plant February 3 through May 14, 2023.
Curated by Josephine Denis & Jacqueline Kok
Presented in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Anique Jordan is an award-winning artist, writer, and curator whose practice stems from and returns to the communities that inform it. As an artist, Jordan creates what she calls “impossible images” that combine foundations of traditional Trinidadian carnival and hauntology—a theory referring to past social or cultural elements that linger in the present like a ghost—to challenge historical narratives. By taking a broad view on history and analyzing this historical data through a contemporary lens, Jordan creates space to reinterpret archives and offer new and speculative visions of the future.