TSV Archives (from March 2024)
Featuring works by Shirin Fahimi and Jawa El Khash
Curated by Vince Rozario
From March to April 2024, Trinity Square Video hosted Spectral Futures, an evocative exhibition featuring the digital media practices of artists Jawa El Khash and Shirin Fahimi. The exhibition explored the absence of queer, feminist, and marginalized narratives within dominant historical frameworks, deploying speculative fiction as a method for imagining alternative futures beyond patriarchy, colonialism, and environmental degradation.
Fahimi’s Umm Al Raml’s Sand Narratives engaged with Iranian women practicing mysticism, using geomantic divination to speculate on lost histories of female prophets systematically excluded from orthodox theologies. Through immersive visuals, Fahimi created an intimate space where the mystical intertwined with digital landscapes, inviting audiences to reimagine historical erasures.
In contrast, El Khash’s Upper Side of the Sky reanimated ancient ruins and lost plant life from Palmyra, Syria, decimated by civil war. Using advanced digital techniques, El Khash constructed vivid simulations that invited viewers to engage with the fragmented remains of cultural heritage, not as relics of the past but as living, breathing possibilities for future remembrance.
Employing interactive 3D animation, holography, and video installation, Spectral Futures transformed Trinity Square Video into a site where speculative narratives incubated visions of collective liberation. The works served as portals, salvaging cultural memory from the wreckage of history to imagine new possibilities of existence outside destructive and unsustainable structures.
The exhibition was supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
Documentation by: Jack McCombe
#TrinitySquareVideo #SpectralFutures #DigitalArt #SpeculativeFiction #QueerArt #FeministArt #CulturalMemory #3DArt #Holography #TorontoArtScene
Founded in 1971, it is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and its oldest media arts centre. We are a not-for-profit, charitable organization.
For 50 years, Trinity Square has been a champion of media arts practices. Our activities are guided by a goal to increase our members’ and audiences’ understanding and imagination of what media arts practices can be. Trinity Square strives to create supportive environments, encouraging artistic and curatorial experimentation that challenge medium specificity through education, production and presentation supports.
As video-based practices have become increasingly present across disciplines, Trinity Square engages artists and curators in critical investigations into the changing conditions of perception, materiality and the virtual. We consider all of our artistic activities and structures through a process of critical self-reflection, continuously evaluating the ethical positioning of our programming, jury structures, inter-organizational relationships, et cetera. In addition to holding aesthetic worth in its own right, our artistic programming extends our education and production activities in order to generate new knowledges.
Trinity Square’s programming is guided by three priorities: 1) promoting an expanded definition of media arts; 2) promoting the meaningful engagement of diverse voices in all levels of our operations; and 3) supporting and nurturing the production of new works by artists and curators. Our membership represents the diversity of the city and honours the original mandate of the organization—seeking to reduce barriers to access related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and socio- economic and physical ability.
