Biography
Emelie Chhangur is an artist, curator, and award-winning writer based in Toronto. She is known for her process-based, participatory curatorial practice and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside the gallery context. Chhangur has developed an experimental approach to curatorial writing with an interest in how texts perform to create unique interpretative experiences. Over the past decade, she has been committed to finding inventive ways to enact activisms from within an institutional framework, questioning the nature and social function of the contemporary art gallery through embedded criticality and new methods of gallery "in-reach." She currently holds the position of Assistant Director/Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Toronto and is the founder of the AGYU’s residency program. Chhangur makes single channel videos, installations, and performances that are shown nationally and internationally.
Statement of Intent
I look forward to working closely with Johnson Ngo on all aspects of gallery programming at AGYU and devising new discursive programming that functions to bring the many different audiences of AGYU together while being respectful of their differing subject positions (from Jane-Finch to students on campus to the art community, especially a younger generation of artists). I believe Johnson brings a unique sensibility to the ways in which pluralism in the arts might be articulated within the framework of a gallery's infrastructure (i.e. what a gallery is) and not just as autonomous programming (i.e. what a gallery does), something I have been dedicated during my time at AGYU. During our time together, Johnson and I will work closely on a wide range of projects, from re-thinking accessibility in the visual arts to exploring new models for participatory programming to catching up on recent critical texts we feel pertinent to the work that we will undertake together. I also look forward to working with Johnson on the third and final iteration of the AGYU's Centre for Incidental Activisms opening in early 2016. Together we will dream up big, ambitious, and risky projects and knowing the two of us, make them happen.