Hosted by Gallery TPW
We were pleased to partner with Gallery TPW and the National Gallery of Canada on a public talk with artist Liz Johnson Artur, which took place on August 5, 2025. The event marked the first activation of Contemporary Art and Archive Practices (CAAP), an international series of public convenings led by Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.). Focused on the borders of contemporary art and archival practice, CAAP unfolded as part of the 2025–26 edition of Re:assemblages, a dynamic, multi-year programme designed to foster collaboration and experimentation across postcolonial art archives and library collections.
Hosted at Gallery TPW, Liz Johnson Artur led two in-person sessions centred on her Black Balloon Archive, guiding audiences through a practice spanning photography, film, and installation. For nearly four decades, Johnson Artur has documented the lives and presence of Black people and communities around the world. Focusing on sites of community gathering including faith-based, social, street, and domestic spaces, her archive evidences what she describes as “normality, everyday life, and moments. Diversity, things that might not make headlines but need to be represented.” Her work reflects deep interests in music, style, and celebration, while also engaging themes of gender identity, sexuality, race, protest, DIY and countercultures, religion, and the manifestation of power across all stages of life.
Extending the conversations initiated during the convening, a forthcoming chapbook commissioned as part of Re:assemblages, brings together a written response to this first CAAP activation. Written by Safia Siad, the essay reflects on Liz’s Black Balloon Archive through a methodology of invocation, attending to forms of ancestral, communal, and somatic knowledge that resist conventional archival capture. Drawing on Tina Campt’s concept of still-moving images, the text explores how Liz’s work activates overlapping sensory registers, visual, sonic, and haptic inviting modes of engagement that move beyond the purely visual and toward embodied forms of remembering.
PROGRAMME SCHEDULE
Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2025
2:00 – 5:00pm | Community Drop-In Session
In this intimate and informal session, Johnson Artur invites members of the public, artists and community groups to engage directly with the Black Balloon Archive, offering them the opportunity to look through her artist books, photographs and archive materials. The artist will be present.
7:00 – 9:00pm | Artist Talk
For this session, presented as the opening artistic activation of Guest Artists Space Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation’s AAL Lab Convenings series, Liz Johnson Artur will speak about her work, delving deeper into the history and development of the Black Balloon Archive and responding to audience questions.
ABOUT LIZ JOHNSON ARTUR
Liz Johnson Artur (b. 1964, Bulgaria) lives and works in London, UK. Her practice includes photography, film and installation, placing the photograph as a starting point to develop work. She has shown internationally, with solo exhibitions Black Balloon Archive at the British Library (2024), of life of love of sex of movement of hope at FOAM Amsterdam (2021), Dusha at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and If you know the beginning, the end is no trouble at the South London Gallery in London (both 2019). Group exhibitions include Tituba, Who Protect Us? at Palais de Tokyo (2024), Pick-Up Notes at Melly Rotterdam (2024), Masculinities at Barbican, London (2020); A Time For New Dreams at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) and the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018). Her work is held in public and private collections in Canada, the US and the UK.
Johnson Artur was nominated for the AIMIA Photography prize in 2017, a key moment which established a burgeoning interest in Toronto’s diasporic communities. In 2020 she received the Turner Bursary and in 2021 the prestigious Women in Motion Award at Rencontres d'Arles. Two new monographic publications are forthcoming this fall at Bierke Verlag and Mack Books.
ABOUT GALLERY TPW
Gallery TPW is a non-profit artist-run centre dedicated to exhibiting experimental artistic and curatorial practices that push the boundaries of lens-based media, creating a forum for critical dialogue and community engagement.
170 St. Helens Ave, M6H 4A1
Directions: Visitors arriving by TTC can walk from Lansdowne Station, or take the 505 Dundas Street West Streetcar, the 506 College Streetcar, or the 47 Lansdowne Bus. Gallery TPW has ramp access, an accessible ground-floor washroom, and clear, unobstructed pathways within the gallery. Please note that there are no automatic doors at the entrance or for the washroom and no designated accessible parking nearby.
Images courtesy of GalleryTPW