Making Space began in August 2020 between friends and co-organizers, Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun, following the need for a space to share stories, skills, and to be in community alongside other BIPOC emerging artists. Our pilot year as a collective grew through mentorship, guidance, and financial support from Latitude 53 and the Mitchell Art Gallery. As part of this pilot year, Latitude 53 extended an invitation to share space through a curatorial project and exhibition in amiskwaciwâskahikan, the soil between plants.

the soil between plants explores how we tend to ourselves, our ancestors, the land, and to each other. This exhibition celebrates the collaborative works and collective growth of emerging and mid-career BIPOC artists, designers, and writers in Making Space.

the soil between plants.

When we tend, we look towards softness, tenderness, patience, and the less explainable. The work of tending isn’t without acknowledging the hardships, or the anger; it extends into where we get stuck, how we categorize and are compartmentalized, and where we’re extracted from. We want to honor our labours, the immeasurably important work we do in holding our secrets close, with our hands in our garden's soil, in reliability, resistance, play, in what is exploited under disconnection, and in the invisible and visible work of healing from it all.

Stories and storytelling make space for entanglements and resist the extractive knowledge exchange that institutions demand. the soil between plants considers what a purposefully entangled curatorial process could look like, across place and space, honouring the multiplicities of identities we take up as we move across them.

To tend is to show care through consistency, to nourish that feeling in our bellies that self-soothes. To pause, to hold, and hold steady. 

the soil between plants is curated by Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun, with writing curated by Shalaka Jadhav. This statement was written in collaboration between Kiona, Sanaa, and Shalaka. 

Thank you to Winnie Uong, Kristen Padilla, Makda Ghezehei and Ava Plain on behalf of MSDAA for their branding direction and website design. We’d also like to thank Ilsa Ahmad (Making Space’s Exhibitions and Administrative Assistant) for supporting and collaborating on this alongside the Making Space team.

Artwork and Exhibition photos courtesy of Adam Waldron- Blain and Hannah Quimper-Swiderski on behalf of Latitude 53.

We’d like to thank the EAC for their support in making this project possible, through their program Grants for Individuals and Collectives: Major Artist Driven Projects