A new contemporary art space at the site of Sugar Beach in Toronto

SUGAR opens within Toronto’s emerging East Bayfront neighborhood at the Daniels City of the Arts. The area’s historic Redpath Sugar Refinery provides the conceptual framework for SUGAR: a 3-year curatorial project directed by Ala Roushan and Xenia Benivolski. Between 2019–22, SUGAR will feature exhibitions, performances, publications and new commissions from local and international artists with a focus that challenges the related notions of site specificity and public art. 

Slavs and Tatars: Pickle Politics
October 17, 2019–January 31, 2020 

Pickle Politics is the inaugural exhibition at SUGAR by the artist collective Slavs and Tatars. In the context of our site, the artists activate a cycle of work that uses fermentation to consider the transformative conditions of politics and culture. Ogórek Trocki posters, repeating the image of a lost pickle-cucumber specimen, desired for its high sugar content, set the stage for a lecture marathon by Slavs and Tatars. Six consecutive lectures punctuate the exhibition, connecting the subject of fermentation with transliteration, language, cultural transference, and colonialism. Hamdami loops to illustrate the coincidences of language as simultaneously political and metaphysical. And the Pickle Juice Bar provides an opportunity to consume other life as microbiomes: Pickle Politics looks to the practices and symbolism of fermentation, constructing a political argument using notions of the rotten, the spoiled, and the soured. (Slavs and Tatars, 2016).  

Slavs and Tatars’ practice has been devoted to the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China, known as Eurasia. Fermentation is emblematic of our current times, as political forces in Russia, Asia and the Middle East challenge traditional axes of power: this cosmo-political balancing act continues to shape, reflect and drive forward ideologies that square the East and the West with contingent processes of life and death. The notion of fermentation offers another space between cultural and geographical territories, shifting beyond the Levi-Strauss trichotomy of the “raw,” the “cooked” and the “rotted.” Fermentation is that life-giving, death-driven process that takes place outside of what we think of as progress: a problematic historical approach that conflates the raw/cooked with the primitive/advanced. Activating the microbiomes that comprise a critical mass within the human body, fermentation affects our biological, ecological and political boundaries with generative potential.

SUGAR is a city-based project that tracks urban transformation through diaspora, public intervention and political potential. The city is changing; its public spaces, expressions and attitudes have an opportunity to transform. Pickle Politics is a project about fermentation, about the forming of culture anew, through engaged transformation, conversation, and the inclusion of other forms of life.

Schedule of events:
Opening: October 17, 6–10pm
Remarks: 7:15pm 
Lecture performance by Slavs and Tatars, Transliterative Tease: 7:30–8:20pm

Friday, October 18
Lecture performances by Slavs and Tatars:
6pm Al isnad 
7:30pm Red Black Thread

Saturday, October 19 
Lecture performances by Slavs and Tatars:
12pm Molla Nasreddin: Embrace Your Antithesis 
1pm Lunch (provided at SUGAR) 
2pm I utter other 
3:30pm 79.89.09 (this lecture will be presented in Persian)

Slavs and Tatars is an internationally-renowned art collective devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Salt, Istanbul; Vienna Secession; Kunsthalle Zurich; Albertinum Dresden; and Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw, among others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications and lecture-performances. In addition to their translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (currently in its 2nd edition with I.B. Tauris), Slavs and Tatars have published ten books to date, most recently Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018) on the politics of alphabets and transliteration. Their work is currently on view at the 58th Venice Biennale: May You Live in Interesting Times.

ShapeShift
ShapeShift is an ongoing research and event program, situated around the site of SUGAR. In 2019, this research took the form of a digital platform and printed publication with contributions by Reza Negarestani, Candice Hopkins, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Anna Zett, Tanya Busse, Zineb Sedira, Forest Curriculum with Sung Tieu, edited by Xenia Benivolski and Ala Roushan. 

ShapeShift: Sugar Oil Gold (2019) explores material dynamics of chemical and geopolitical substances that transform realities, histories and futures. In constant shapeshift, these materials move from a local context, get defined as capital commodity, and function as lubricant and enabler of contemporary life, culture, class, and labour. 

ShapeShift as a research platform also produced SHIFT: a dance party that paid homage to the Club by using dance and discourse to animate the material and cultural conditions we explore. SHIFT was the first edition of this series of events, addressing the site of Sugar Beach, where a colonial history of the sugar production industry between Canada, UK and the Caribbean mirrors a history of cultural exchange and appropriation in music.

To experience the projects that have been part of ShapeShift please visit:
sugarcontemporary.com/shapeshift
sugarcontemporary.com/#!past

Programming 
SUGAR is curated as cycles of programming that change in duration and format, linking and transforming the conceptual threads that define our curatorial research.  

Between 2019 and 2021, SUGAR will present the following artists: Slavs and Tatars, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Dora Budor, Sarah Rose, Pamila Matharu, Gabe Levine, Laurie Kang, Lauren Fournier, Stephanie Comilang, Larissa Sansour, Donna Kukama, Jonathan Adjemian, Cameron Lee, Tanya Busse, Orit Halpern, Bryony Halpin, Alex Wolfson, Julian Hou, Deep Blue.

Curatorial advisory 
SUGAR as a project reflects on international movements that form and shape local trajectories. Our curatorial advisory group involves Chrissie Iles (Whitney Museum, NYC), Gaëtane Verna (The Power Plant, Toronto), Paul O’Neill (PUBLICS, Helsinki) and Candice Hopkins (Toronto Biennial of Art).

Acknowledgements
SUGAR is grateful to acknowledge the generous support of Daniels Waterfront Corporation (Carol Weinbaum and Niall Haggart). The Goethe-Institut is an Arts Partner of SUGAR. We acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts. Slavs and Tatars’ lecture performances are presented in partnership with the MVS Proseminar at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.