Noni Kaur

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and the Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities (CSACH) are pleased to welcome Noni Kaur as the winter 2024 artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Over the next three months, Kaur will develop a body of research through site-responsive and site-specific artistic investigations, culminating in a non-permanent installation on campus. 

Kaur practice explores cultural history through rituals and materials that are adapted or transformed in different environments according to posthuman experiences, through decay, regeneration and cellular building systems. With great rigour and robust fervour, she creates site-specific installations that trace the unseen agency of cellular, plasmic, and parasitic forces in both human and non-human worlds. Kaur’s vibrant and colourful spatial interventions unpack cycles of life and death, ephemerality, and nature while exploring materiality, ritual, assimilation, and gaps between human and post-human environments. Her works are live conversations about lived experiences.

The residency will invite art into the academic spaces of the university and give students and faculty a place to think about the role of contemporary art in public conversations. CSACH brings together the University of Toronto’s outstanding tri-campus South Asia faculty and graduate students for workshops and research activities. With the diverse student body of UTM and the larger Mississauga area, the program will help to develop an appreciation of contemporary art as practiced by racialized artists in the wider community while contributing significantly to UTM’s cultural landscape. 

As the artist develops their creative work at UTM, discussion of their practice will be integrated into courses in History, History of Religions, Women and Gender Studies, Visual Culture and Communication, Art History, Art Studio, and/or Cinema Studies. Interested classes will invite the selected artist to come and speak about their work and engage the class in participatory/experiential activities related to artmaking as a response to political and social transformations in contemporary South Asia and the South Asian diaspora

Noni’s Art Installation in the Maanjiwe Nendamowinan building

Discover more of Sensory rituals as you listen to Noni’s self-guided audio tour as you walk through her installation, featured on the second floor of the Maanijwe Nendamowinan building.

This residency is in partnership with Jackman Humanities Institute and Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities at University of Toronto (CSACH) .

The Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities was established in 2013. CSACH brings together the University of Toronto’s outstanding tricampus South Asia faculty and graduate students for workshops and research activities. CSACH is based at the UTM campus, which is world-renowned for its depth of faculty expertise in this area but enjoys tricampus membership and hosts events across all U of T campuses. The Centre has grown dramatically since its inception and regularly hosts events ranging from public lectures, workshops and cultural performances to graduate summer schools.