Imaging Home: Resistance, Migration, Contradiction

Exhibit dates:

Tuesday, June 24, 2014 to Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Reception date & time:

Tuesday, June 24, 5:00-8:00pm

Description:

Opening 5:00 to 8:00 on Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Guest speakers:

Namela Baynes-Henry of Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD), Guyana; Richard Lusimbo, Research and Document Manager at Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG); Singer/performer: Brayo Bryans, Executive Director, Icebreakers Uganda.

The ArQuives’s 2014 WorldPride exhibition, Imaging Home: Resistance, Migration, and Contradiction, brings together documentary video and photographic work that raises significant questions about the meaning of “home” in a world that keeps refining homophobic and racist oppression. Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights video portraits of LGBT activists in Uganda, Kenya, Botswana, Jamaica, Guyana, Belize, Saint Lucia and India speak directly to what it means to work to continue the struggle to advance LGBT rights at home and internationally, despite violence and risk. Guyanese photographer, Ulelli Vrebeke, offers lyrical photo/text images of migrants from Guyana and the Caribbean to Toronto whose sense of home shifts and unfolds in complex and unexpected ways. Archival documentary videos by Anton Wagner and Edimburgo Cabrera trace the tenuous lives of Latino and black drag queens in millennial Toronto (1998-2007). Video and photographic evidence of ‘home’ brought to Toronto by members of the queer diaspora are woven together as visual testaments to the possibilities of home, here and away. The exhibition is a joint project of The ArQuives and the international project: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights.

Also opening on June 24, is a satellite exhibition by Samra Habib, Queer and Muslim: Finding Peace Within Islam (see details below).

Above photo credit: Ulelli Verbeke. A. and H. are lesbians both from Jamaica. They have been together for 3 years. Over these past years, they have been targets of robbery, housing discrimination, rape and police harassment in Jamaica. They are seeking asylum in Canada.

Note on Envisioning and the guest speakers:

Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights is a partnership of mutual learning, bringing together 31 partners based in Africa, India, the Caribbean and Canada to undertake a project of research, participatory video and documentary, capacity enhancement and knowledge mobilization, working together to make the vision of LGBT rights a reality. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, based at the Centre for Feminist Research, York University.

Envisioning speakers:

Nancy Nicol, Professor, York University. Documentary Film Director
Principle Investigator: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights
Namela Baynes-Henry, Co-chairperson Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD), Guyana. Researcher, Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights (Will speak on the Caribbean research and participatory video work… and some of the Caribbean portraits)
Richard Lusimbo Research and Document Manager at Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). Chair: Africa Research Team, Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights (Will speak on the Africa research and participatory video work.. and some of the Africa portraits)
Singer/performer: Brayo Bryans, Executive Director, Icebreakers Uganda; Production Manager, Talented Ugandan Kuchus (TUK) (a group of LGBT Ugandans using different types of arts to entertain, economically empower, sensitize, and advocate for equality for all).
Videographer: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights
www.envisioninglgbt.blogspot.com

In India, Envisioning, in partnership with Naz Foundation India Trust created a documentary, No Easy Walk To Freedom, (May 2014, 92 min.) on the history of the struggle against section 377 of the Indian penal code, which criminalizes ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature.’ www.noeasywalktofreedom.com