Song. Prayer. Scream. A Praxis Of Looking is a writing workshop that asks us to consider the ways artists offer pathways of escape from everyday oppressions—sites of pleasure outside expected forms of work, gender, family and desire.

Each week, critics Yaniya Lee and Jessica Lynne will post a pre-recorded conversation that traces their thinking and questions around Blackness & Modernity, Black Technologies, Sousveillance, Repair & Healing & Pleasure. Theory, visual art, poetry, literature and music guide them through considerations of art criticism and new expansive ways of seeing.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Amber Jamila Musser, Aria Dean, Harmony Holiday,  Edouard Glissant, M. Nourbese Phillip, Simone Browne and Sylvia Wynter, among others, act as Song. Prayer. Scream’s northstars.

You will be invited to respond to writing prompts and post related texts, art, video clips, poems, and songs to the Song. Prayer. Scream are.na page. Lynne and Lee will hold weekly office hours for talk back sessions to ask questions, discuss responses to workshop prompts, and continue the conversation.

March & April, 2021
Presented by Cassandra Press and hosted at the Women's Center for Creative Work

are.na page: https://www.are.na/kandis-williams/song-prayer-scream-a-praxis-of-looking

Videos avalailable upon request.








Chroma
Fall 2020 issue of Canadian Art Magazine

A year in the making, the fall 2020 issue of Canadian Art, available now, surveys the aesthetic practices and legacies of Black art production in Canada and beyond. Edited by Denise Ryner, writer and director/curator at Or Gallery, and Yaniya Lee, writer and features editor at Canadian Art, “Chroma” continues the work of “Bodies Borders Fields,” a 2019 symposium that reflected on how legacies of Black art and Black presence are omitted from Canada’s contemporary art narratives. With recent (renewed) institutional interest in Black Canadian art, and the twin pandemics of systemic racism and COVID-19 revealing how social inequality touches all sectors of life, how is Blackness being thought and rethought? In what ways are artists pushing for change? How does art address, and archive, these moments? Blackness, and Black creative practices, has survived through excesses and refusals; in “Chroma,” artists, writers and thinkers continue discussions that have too often been sidestepped in mainstream contemporary art publications—including this one. 

Read “Excesses and Refusals,” an editorial note by Yaniya Lee and Denise Ryner, here:
https://canadianart.ca/essays/chroma-an-introduction/

Find some of the content online here:
https://canadianart.ca/issues/fall-2020-chroma/

Watch the launch here:
https://canadianart.ca/videos/chroma-launch-kelsey-adams-and-david-woods-in-conversation/







Revolution in Monogamy?
an online writing workshop
organized by Yaniya Lee and Fan Wu
as part of the Prairie Art Book Fair, 2020

COVID enforces a couples-as-exception rule to social distancing: so we wonder, maybe now’s as good a time as any to sign up for monogamy, despite our queer-bred skepticism. The myth of triumphant monogamy has resurged, even though it never really went away.

The current global uprising against police brutality and systemic racism has prompted outrage at inequities that have, like the couple form, remained a constant presence throughout our modern age. Recent protests have demonstrated that the myth of the end of racism has hopefully been definitively overturned.

Amidst this cyclical return of protest, now in context of a pandemic, the monogamy of the couple form resists the rupture. These protests have made other forms of collectivity seem more necessary and urgent. This means that the couple form emerges as counterproductive to the aims of protest and revolution.

Does coupling up mean you are denying your revolutionary spirit? What are the stakes of monogamy, and how do they overlap, clash, or conspire with the stakes of revolution? How do monogamous attachments delimit the terms of revolution?

In this discussion & writing workshop, we will be putting the two curious bedfellows of revolution and monogamy side by side. We will wonder together whether revolutionary politics requires a revolution within the structures of monogamy itself

Monogamy projects an ever-receding horizon of happiness, while revolution projects an ever-approaching rupture in social configurations. These two ideals lie at the very core of our affective and political fantasies. We will be reading excerpts from Frank Wilderson’s “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement” and Assata Shakur’s “To My People” alongside My King as exemplary texts on revolution and monogamy. This workshop only begins to scratch the surface of these fantasies’ entwinement.

https://plugin.org/exhibitions/yaniyalee_fanwu_2020pabf_event/







Rock Gardens
A Conversation Exploring Other Tangled Forms of Living Together
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, March 7, 2020

A performance reading by Lisa Robertson and Yaniya Lee for the Beginning with the Seventies symposium.

Watch documentation here:
https://belkin.ubc.ca/rock-gardens/









Bodies, Borders, Fields Symposium
November 22, 23 and 24, 2019
Toronto, Canada

A “simultaneous conversation” took place on August 16, 1967 between seven speakers in Toronto and New York with the cooperation of Bell Telephone Company, the CBC and artscanada magazine (formerly Canadian Art). This cross-border conversation was recorded and published in that year’s October issue of artscanada, which was, dedicated to “black” as a concept, painterly medium, symbol as well as socio-political category, expression and status.

Convened by Denise Ryner in collaboration with Yaniya Lee, Bodies Borders Fields is a free, public symposium that re-imagines the 1967 conversation about “blackness” with particular attention to blackness and fugitivity as represented in critical art practices today. Responding to an absence of black experience in the conversation between the 1967 panelists—an absence that has since been examined by writers Fred Moten, Krys Verrall and others—Bodies Borders Fields will dislocate the original panel discussion to contemporary contexts and representations of black and blackness in sound, performance and visual culture with respect to black social life and expression.

Find recordings of the talks and performances (under the resources tab) here:

https://www.bodiesbordersfields.com











Desire x Politics
a writing workshop
organized by Yaniya Lee & Fan Wu
at Mercer Union Gallery, 2019-2020

We want to begin to understand how desire and politics shape each other. Desire moves us through the world of relations with wild impulses and unconscious convictions. Politics is a practice of relationality, and its ideal is based on justice and reason. Desire and politics are never not at odds: insofar as politics is fundamentally relational and deals in power, and desire is fundamentally a lack that exceeds our will. Desire and politics are helplessly intertwined, hopelessly opposed. In this workshop we  read and write together as a way to unravel the ways in which these two modes converge, diverge, enable and interrupt each other.

We  work through a preliminary, though by no means exhaustive, set of questions: Where do politics and desire meet? Do they exchange awkward glances, fall into a duel, fumble their way toward embrace? Can we make desire Good and Right or does it retain its utmost state as moral chaos? How do my ethical beliefs shape my desires, my repulsions, my understanding of romance? Can my lust undermine the principles that structure my political ideals?

In the first part of this workshop we  study the desire x politics configuration through psychoanalysis, Marxism, novelistic treatments of desire, poetics of white thirst, manifestos against monogamy, and tracts about new forms of contemporary intimacy. The syllabus is co-constructed by participants and takes the shape of our collective desires. As we read, we also closely study the forms this writing takes, and the ways in which these constructions influences our thinking about desire x politics.

In the second part of the workshop, we compose new writing work on desire x politics.


https://www.mercerunion.org/events/session-desire-x-politics/

https://www.facebook.com/events/mercer-union-a-centre-for-contemporary-art/call-for-participants-writing-workshop-on-desire-x-politics/407899243094174/












blue ferment: a intimate dinner performance by Laurie Kang and Yaniya Lee
The Table art space, Toronto, March 31, 2018

See documentation here:

https://www.thetable.info/laurie-kang-and-yaniya-lee