Concordia’s FOFA Gallery debuts three bold new exhibitions this September
From left to right: Adam Mbowe, Aaron McIntosh and Kama La Mackerel.
Opening September 3, the FOFA Gallery presents new works by Studio Arts prof Aaron McIntosh, MFA in Cinematic Arts alum Adam Mbowe, and part-time Contemporary Dance faculty member Kama La Mackerel.
McIntosh, who specializes in fibres and textiles, will debut Hot House / Maison chaude, a project exploring queer community, ecological cycles, and healing. Using “queer compost” both as material and metaphor, the work explores connections between plant life and queerness.
“The queer compost grew from an intention to consider what nourishes plants, but also all beings: the constant generation and regeneration of matter,” McIntosh explains. He hopes visitors — including at community participatory moments — will interact with the materials, while reflecting and questioning assumptions about “nature,” reproduction, pleasure and kinship beyond human culture.
“Queer people have not seen an assault on our hard-won human rights at this scale, with this intensity, in the past quarter-century. These artworks and projects call across time to remind us that queerness has always been present in the natural worlds, in our humanity, and will never be eradicated by the legislative projects of bigots motivated by fear,” states McIntosh.
Model Offering: Orificium plenus, 2023, by Aaron McIntosh
As for Adam Mbowe, their multimedia project, I Knew This Place Before, will be featured in the Gallery’s Black Box. Combining animation and personal archives, it traces memory and cultural transformation in The Gambia.
“Memory never feels straightforward,” Mbowe reflects.
“It’s fragmented, layered, sometimes blurry and animation lets me capture that essence.This project isn’t just about my memories, but about how personal histories connect to broader conversations about diaspora, national identity, migration, colonial legacy, and changing traditions in The Gambia. It shows how memory and history are always overlapping and affect each other,” they further add.
I Knew This Place Before by Adam Mbowe
Kama La Mackerel will present two interconnected works: To Be Held by the Femme Island / To Be Known by the Trans Body in the York Vitrines, and Forest Body i / Corps Forêt i in the courtyard, supported by Concordia Public Art.
Together, these works create an immersive meditation on gender, lineage, and the afterlives of colonialism.
Basalt body i / Corps basalte i, from the Queering the Is/land Body series, 2023 by Kama La Mackerel. Photo : Ashvin Ramdin
The work in the York Vitrines combines textile installations, self-portrait photography, sound, and video to explore the relationship between the trans body and what La Mackerel calls the “island body”—a spiritual and geographic figure central to their practice.
As for Forest Body i / Corps Forêt i, it features a large-scale photographic portrait of the artist’s trans and racialized body in dialogue with the landscape of their home island, Mauritius. With their work, La Mackerel reimagines the island as a living, femme presence shaped by ancestral, ecological, and geological memory, inviting audiences to witness new connections between body, land, and identity.
The vernissage for the exhibitions takes place on September 3 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Concordia’s FOFA Gallery (EV 1.715, 1515 Ste. Catherine St. W.).