The new year is off to a busy start for one of Faculty of Environmental Studies’ (FES) newest faculty members, Andil Gosine, who will launch a solo exhibit as well as a performance this month.
Gosine joined the Faculty in July 2017, and has been teaching the Environmental Justice, Arts & Politics stream.
On Jan. 20, Gosine will perform his work Our Holy Waters (And Mine) at the Representation Acts program put on by the Los Angeles RedCat Festival. This work has grown out of his research on the legacy of indentureship, the British labour program that brought Indians to the Caribbean in the late 19th century. Ephemera from a previous edition of this piece is also currently included in the acclaimed Relational Undercurrents show of contemporary Caribbean art at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
On Jan. 13, Gosine’s solo exhibition “All the Flowers,” comprising more than a dozen multimedia works, opened at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. The exhibition also drawn on his research about the imbrications of labour, migration and desire, and also uses Indentureship as a starting point. It runs until March 13. He has been invited to give a talk about his work by the Black Educators Network of Durham region on Jan. 27. The gallery will also publish a full catalog for the show during its run.
Gosine was awarded a Visual Arts grant by the Canada Council in 2017 in support of this exhibition, and he is in his third year as principal investigator of a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) award for his research on “Visual Arts After Indentureship.” In 2017, the Columbia University-based journal Small Axe also published a special section “Art After Indenture” arising out of Gosine’s SSHRC project. An image from his photographic documentation of Hindu rituals at Jamaica Bay in Queens was also auctioned off in support of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in November 2017.
Gosine completed both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in FES. As a doctoral student, he designed the popular and long-running course Race-racism and Environmental Justice. He is author of numerous scholarly articles and co-author of Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction. This year, he teaches the graduate workshop Cultural Production: Image and the undergraduate courses in Environmental Justice, and on Environmental Communication.
For more information, visit his website.