Humanities student Victor Arroyo's Ongoing & Upcoming Exhibitions and an Interview

ongoing exhibition

MTL Nord
Modern Fuel Gallery
Kingston, Canada

We are excited to announce the participating artists in our 18th Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition. These artists represent a range of media and practices, including abstract painting, book works and video installations, but share an interest in reflecting on the significance of the exhibition space and the materiality of the works being shown. With artists based in Kingston, Lansdowne, Montréal and Toronto, this exhibition serves as a small survey of practices across the region.

ongoing exhibition

Concordia Remembers 2016
FOFA Gallery 
Crisis
Victor Arroyo

Victor Arroyo is an artist, researcher and social activist working with experimental and documentary practices in video and installation art. His work is concerned with the changing nature of revolutionary praxis, or what is often referred to as political and activist art. Arroyo is also interested in material culture, landscape and identity through the critical lens of postmodern geography, specifically notions of discursive diasporas, geographies of exclusion and structural violence. His research and practice engages with the disappearance of personal and collective memory and how, through political and activist art, novel configurations of memory can be re-instituted. Arroyo is currently completing his doctorate studies at Concordia University.

Concordia Remembers is an annual exhibition hosted by the Faculty of Fine Art Gallery (FOFA) in the month of November. The initiative seeks to offer a vision of peace, is a call to thoughtful engagement, an invitation to consider the role of memorial through image.

The image titled Crisis is a reflection on the Mexican crisis of 1994, a socio-political upheaval sparked by the Mexican government's sudden devaluation of Mexico's national currency in December 1994, coinciding with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the uprising of the EZLN.

upcoming exhibition

FOFA Gallery 
MTL Nord
Victor Arroyo

On the evening of August 9, 2008, Fredy Villanueva was shot and killed by police officer Jean-Loup Lapointe at the Henri-Bourassa Arena in the Montréal Nord area. Riots broke out the next day, and with that, a social movement was born: the Montréal Nord Affaire. The killing of Fredy Villanueva not only stirred up years of social exclusion and discontent, but also brought visibility to current tactics of police surveillance, institutional power asymmetries and racial profiling. Montréal Nord operates under the gaze of power; security and surveillance cameras, CCTV, Google Maps and Google street view—all employ a vertical glance operated by assorted asymmetrical institutional mechanisms, forging composite vertical views. These mechanisms act in ambiguous and invisible ways, much like how social exclusion co-exists among uneven representation of the marginalized. Victor Arroyo documented the Montréal Nord grassroots movement and their sites of resistance with a surveillance camera, mirroring tactics of surveillance. His work MTL Nord seeks to rupture the unidirectional nature of the gaze, transforming surveillance into a dynamic relationship, while undermining the distinction between the watchers and the watched.