Even through mid-March Eve and I continued to speak about her upcoming exhibition as if it might happen as scheduled. She described plans for an April train trip to Toronto to film a performance, and I researched bollards that might be installed in the gallery. Our early withdrawals felt temporary and surmountable, but as the month drew to a close we began modifying these plans to account for the dwindling access to materials and travel and the prospect of not being allowed a physical audience in the gallery. Despite the impending uncertainty we persevered through those conversations with intention, as if what we were working towards was still an inevitability. By the time it was clear that the exhibition wouldn’t proceed in May as planned, no more conversation was necessary. We had to admit to ourselves that we no longer knew how to plan. 

Franz Kaka

*

Though there were quiet warnings months before and the potential devastation of a global pandemic was already being discussed—if not planned for—by various government agencies, these past months have exceeded every notion of predictability, as if we were, on this rare occasion, being struck by a truly contingent event. All dominant systems—whether economic or cultural, social or scientific, political or metaphysical—are founded upon some notion of necessity, but true contingency leaves no room for rigid dogma. In the introduction to a collection of essays published with the exhibition New York to London and Back - The Medium of Contingency at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, UK, Robin McKay writes, “the necessity to think contingency spells the ruin of all such systems—systems of thought which would subordinate the events that befall us to some kind of predestined necessity; which argue that, in principle at least, everything can be known in advance; and which, in doing so, imply … the possibility that the thinking subject can in principle withdraw from the contingencies of the world into a space where the occurrence of every event has already been written.” To leave space for this inexplicable excess is not a means to avoid accountability—and these systems must still actively be confronted and challenged—but to acknowledge the unknowable already relinquishes many of the anthropocentric myths that support the thinking of these systems—especially those that claim control over nature—decentring human subjectivity in relation to the world as a result.  

Eve and Emii’s collaboration has the ring of contingency about its origin too. A social media algorithm first introduced Eve to Emii’s work, who then initiated a conversation that has now led them to this—and future—projects. At each subsequent step their burgeoning connection might have broken down, but instead their mutual admiration and generative spirit has sustained and grown this collaboration. The result, an extensive web of conversations that include images, research materials, videos, and texts exceeds what could have been predicted, and its continued expansion feels much like the gardens referenced in their work, overgrown and unwieldy. But this may just be the nature of any new collaboration. To be a good collaborator necessitates an openness to being open. And not just an openness to new inputs, but more fundamentally a willingness to be opened by these forces. This is when control is abandoned so that contingency might strike. 

What is unplanned cannot be planned against, and the predictive modelling that seems increasingly determined to shape our experience of the world is vulnerable to any openness founded upon the contingent. Without being overly deterministic, which would negate the above, it seems safe to say that we will continue to be confronted by contingency. As strange and unsettling as these encounters may be they are also full of radical potential, which may be opened through collaborations yet to be determined.

Eve Tagny is a Montreal based artist. Navigating between writing, photography, video and plant-based installation, she explores themes pertaining to the ever-evolving expressions of hybrid identities. Her practice focuses on mending post-traumatic disruptions in accordance with nature, looking at the correlations between bereavement processes and natural spaces, rhythms and organic materials, which serve as the ultimate guides for pathways of resiliency and renewal.

She holds a BFA in Film production/documentary from Concordia University and a certificate in Journalism from the University of Montreal. With her photo series and artist photobook Lost Love, she won the inaugural Mfon Legacy Grant, was shortlisted for the CAP Prize and for the Burtynsky Photobook Grant. Her work has been shown at Xpace Cultural Centre, Critical Distance, VTape, Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, Toronto; Never Apart, and Centre Clark, Montreal, Canada; nGbk, Kleiner Salon, Berlin, Germany.

Emii Alrai is an artist based in Leeds. Alrai’s practice is informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity and post-colonial museum practices of collecting and displaying objects. Focusing on the ancient mythologies from the Middle East alongside personal oral histories of Iraq, Alrai weaves together narratives by forging artefacts and visualising residues of cultural collision.  Drawing references from objects in museum collections, ancient writing from the Middle East and cultural memories, her work questions the value and origins of artefacts, as well as navigating the experience of diaspora. 

She studied her BA in Fine Art and an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at The University of Leeds. Alrai is currently part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International Sculpture Network and was selected for the 2019 Arab British Centre Making Marks Project in Kuwait and the 2018 Tetley Artist Associate Programme. Recent group and solo exhibitions include: The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2020); VITRINE, London (2019), Fallow, Rectory Projects (2019), Two Queens, Leicester, UK (2019); GLOAM, Sheffield, UK (2018); (2018); Caustic Casual, Salford, UK (2017); Hutt Collective, Nottingham, UK (2017).

Franz Kaka is a contemporary art gallery in Toronto, Ontario, presenting project based exhibitions with emerging and mid-career artists. The gallery has gained notoriety as a port for nationally- and internationally-recognized artists interested in experimenting within established practices.