Quick Fire: 5 Questions with Mikiki
Queer video and performance artist Mikiki, one of our six Community Arts Space partners, tells us about the importance of community collaboration in creating meaningful public space in Toronto.
Why is it important for public spaces to make room for “art making”?
I think public spaces are already sites of art making. There are more formalist or contextualist ‘Capital A’ Art projects in public spaces and it’s important for us to have institutional support as they force the question, and push people who may think they don’t interact with or ‘get’ contemporary art into dialogue with it. I think we have pushed people away from Art by somehow prescribing that either you get it or you don’t. If you have physical senses and experience it, you ‘get it’ in that you recall from your own personal lexicon of visual culture and lived experience. Yes there are more nuanced readings but that shouldn’t stop someone’s ability to engage.
Oh and also LABOUR! Art making is WORK, valid, legitimate, (and for the vast majority of artists) underpaid work! It’s important for the public to see creative process and practice as a form of labour that engages the public sphere and the public commons is one of the most poignant places for that to occur.
What is the significance of having access to a downtown cultural institution to present your work?
Having access to the Gardiner legitimizes my art practice to my parents. Ha! Just kidding, they already believe in what I do. But in all seriousness, there is a validation that comes from being programmed in an institution and the ability to have your work reach an audience it otherwise wouldn’t access.
Art needs to be ____, _____, and ____ in order to incite change.
current, accurate, honest*.
*Of course all of those things are relative.
How can art bring a community together?
I am a firm believer in the power of art to inflame and enrage as much as delight and mystify. The world is a really terrible place for many many people and art-making can be a way to reclaim collective space and process, or to affirm one’s existence through the creation of counter-realities.
How do art and change intersect?
One salient example from recent history is the amazing work of Gran Fury, the artist collective wing of ACT UP, starting in the first decade of the AIDS Pandemic. They created such amazing work as the iconic Silence = Death poster and the AIDSGate poster holding then president Reagan to account for never having mentioned AIDS publicly since the beginning of the crisis. We have a current, local incarnation of this method through AIDS Action Now!’s posterVIRUS project, an ongoing activist street and online art initiative pairing artists with activists to respond to contemporary issues in the HIV response and HIV reality through making posters.
MIKIKI is one of this year’s Community Arts Space: Art is Change partners. They will be presenting a series of original choreographed performances on a foundation of wet clay between July 18 to 27. Learn more and RSVP for a performance here.
Photos by Brittany Carmichael.