Artist in Residence Anique Jordan is an acclaimed artist, writer, curator, organizer and city builder who has participated in residencies around the world, lectured extensively and exhibited in numerous galleries.
She was awarded the 2017 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Artist Award in 2018. In 2017, she was co-curator of the AGO exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood. She completed an artist residency in 2017-18 at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago) and is the former executive director of Whippersnapper Gallery in Toronto. She has a specialized honours BA in international development as well as a master’s in environmental studies from York University.
Working for more than a decade at the crossroads of community economic development and art, Jordan’s work as an artist plays with the foundations of traditional Trinidadian carnival and the theory of hauntology – challenging historical narratives and creating what she calls “impossible images.”
During her 2018-19 residency at Osgoode, she used the story of Clara Ford – a black Toronto-born woman who stood trial for the murder in 1894 of a wealthy white man who had allegedly assaulted her – to develop a two-hour, durational performance involving eight artists that brought this buried legal history into “a futuristic imagining of emancipation, freedom and the complexities of black survival.”
Read the YFile story about the performance.