Presenting Stories about Objects from Peripheral Histories with Aanchal Malhotra

Part of the Community Arts Space: Art is Change

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The August Fröhls collective (led by artists/curators Aman Sandhu and Swapnaa Tamhane) will invite artists and creative practitioners to engage with local forms of storytelling, teaching, object histories, and music, within a site-specific installation on the plaza inspired by the portable classroom.

For artists/curators August Fröhls (Aman Sandhu and Swapnaa Tamhane), a significant amount of their early education in the Greater Toronto Area (specifically Scarborough and Markham) was spent in portable classrooms. Sandhu and Tamhane explore their speculative hypothesis that the presence of portable classrooms at Canadian schools could be viewed in parallel to the influx of immigrants into the Canadian landscape.

Originally intended as temporary space solutions, portable classrooms eventually became permanent infrastructure, set in place to provide extra room for a population growth that the main buildings could not have anticipated. Propositioning the portable as a space for peripheral pedagogy and histories, August Fröhls will create a site-specific outdoor installation harkening to the recognizable materials of the portable structure, and present a series of events that elicit lesser-known histories. Furthermore, operating from a belief that improvisation is a strong catalyst for the unearthing of third-space, collaged histories, improvisation as related to forms of pedagogy, storytelling, and history of objects will be explored throughout the duration of Portable Stories.

About the Speaker

Aanchal Malhotra is an artist and oral historian, working with memory and material culture. She received a BFA in Traditional Printmaking and Art History at the Ontario College of Art & Design, Toronto, and a MFA in Studio Art from Concordia University, Montréal. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, US, UK and India. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity. She can also be found at her photoblog, The Hiatus Project. She currently lives in New Delhi.

About the Community Arts Space: Art is Change

The Gardiner Museum’s unique history and identity is rooted in the city,  but its future is increasingly shaped by those beyond the core cultural corridor. As space increasingly becomes a premium downtown, the Gardiner has collaborated with six cultural and community partners to consider how institutional outreach can be re-shaped by local artists, curators, and architects. Looking to the rapid high-rise developments happening within the Museum’s own Yorkville neighbourhood, the projects in Art is Change consider how the city’s unique and varied local histories of art and social activism can be re-mapped for the future. Learn more