Private Thoughts/Public Moments
13 September - 10 December 2000
Artist/Curator: Sutapa Biswas

Private Thoughts/Public Moments is a collaboration between the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the South Asian Visual Arts Collective (SAVAC) and U.K.-based artist Sutapa Biswas. The exhibition brings together site-specific works by artists from SAVAC that engage and interact with different aspects of the Art Gallery of Ontario's permanent collection. Through workshops with Sutapa Biswas, the participating artists have produced interventions that explore features of the display of Canadian Historical art at the AGO. The Canadian Historical galleries at the Art Gallery of Ontario chart the identity of what it means to be Canadian through selected visual and textual representations, relaying a history of Canada from the days of the early pioneers, through the colonial period, to the first half of the 1900s. The interventions developed by the artists for these galleries raise provocative questions about established Canadian narratives.

The Artists
Space Shifter by Neena Arora is a video installation incorporating sound, with images of the artist in performance in the galleries of the AGO. Playing on an audio accompaniment that instructs viewers on how to read J.E.H. Macdonald's The Beaver Dam (1919) in an adjacent gallery, Arora's work suggests ways for viewers to examine their processes of looking and explore the subject of her video in relation to their own experiences.

Rachel Kalpana James presents fictionalized diaries, whose main character is based on Minnie Ethel Ely, a bohemian woman who sat for F.H. Varley's painting Portrait of Mrs. E (1921). The narrative of the diaries draws inspiration from the visit of Indian poet-mystic Rabindranath Tagore to British Columbia in 1929.

Asma Arshad Mahmood's sound installation refers to the established conventions of drawing and painting the female nude through the male gaze. Mahmood's soundtrack is activated by lifting the protective that covers J.W.L. Forester's drawing Corrected by Mr. Bouguereau (1882).

Meera Sethi has inserted text panels into the Gallery's laminated historical albums charting aspects of Canadian history. Sethi's panels focus on histories currently absent or missing from the national narrative.