Curated by Sylvie Fortin
Organized by MSVU Art Gallery
I will remember this body, the second volume of Celina Eceiza’s serial exhibition A material called Earth, reimagines her artistic entanglements by drawing on the unique convergence of feminist, conceptual, and craft practices that distinguishes artmaking in Halifax.
The Argentine artist’s situated installation cuts across the Brutalist features of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (MSVU AG) with an ephemeral architecture that immerses visitors in two distinct yet related environments. Hand-dyed and embroidered textiles, a monumental wall drawing, site-specific sculptures, and selected works from the MSVU AG’s permanent collection metabolize both the tall, coffered gallery and the institution’s history. Oversize fabric books sewn onto the floor, wheatpasted drawings, and hand-drawn texts reconfigure the adjacent balconied gallery into a den-like space whose jostling material and narrative registers translate the experiences that have shaped Eceiza’s understanding of art’s purpose and potential, which is indebted to the concept of anthropophagy, or cultural cannibalism.
Volume 2: I will remember this body is the second of many loosely connected exhibitions that make up A material called Earth. Experimenting with forms that contract, detract, and disperse, this serial exhibition is a curatorial laboratory and a response to polycrisis: one ambitious exhibition whose locally anchored parts come together, one after the other, across North America over the course of three years. A material called Earth also speculates on how an exhibition moves as it travels by foregrounding its impermanence and situatedness, and the ways it channels energies, circulates resources, entangles economies, gifts experiences, and metabolizes images and ideas. It explores what an exhibition leaves behind and what it carries forward as it reconfigures, or rather, recycles itself. In this, it tests how migratory exhibition practices might enrich our artistic and social ecosystems and our imaginaries.
This project’s Canadian “volumes” are generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts. Volume 3 will be on view at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, BC, June 24 – August 29, 2027. Volume 1: The life of corners was on view at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Burlington, ON, May 16 – August 16, 2026. Volume 4 will be announced shortly.
Image: Celina Eceiza, A material called Earth, Volume 1: The life of corners (detail), 2026. Art Gallery of Burlington. Photo: Darren Rigo.
