The Institute of Everyday Life (IEL) is a Montreal-based laboratory that looks at the everyday as a site to generate and present artwork and research. For the past eight years, the artists and researchers have been working on the Hybrid Bodies Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration that addresses concepts of kinship, transformation, and transference as they relate to organ transplantation. In this exhibition, artists Ingrid Bachmann, Dana Dal Bo, Emily Jan, and Elliott Rajnovic will put their background research and working processes on display by setting up temporary and performative studios in the York Corridor Vitrines.

Taklif: Ideas of Femininity was formed around our everyday feminine experiences; from which we draw a collection of oral narratives, writings and archival materials. Taklif: تکلیف searches for ways to develop a foundational knowledge for alternative feminist studies, through those material recollections. For the occasion of this exhibition we brought together a collective experience, called Jashn-e-Taklif (ceremony of being dutiful). The exhibition embodies recollection of diverse personal narratives, inhabited within intimate dialogic spaces of companionship and femininity.

Fall Fell Felt begins from an examination of “fail” videos, a popular genre where physical blunders and bloopers are caught on camera and disseminated online. Focusing on an extremely prevalent sub-genre, so-called “girl fails,” Anna Hawkins’s project tests the ability of these images to elicit empathy, while considering the ways that women’s bodies been used throughout the history of moving images to provoke physical and visceral responses from viewers.

Objects of Resistance is an installation produced as a public, interactive performance piece made during the 2017 Women’s March. Using sewing machines, newspaper headlines announcing Donald Trump’s inauguration were “blacked out” with thread. Local, national and international newspapers were donated, as friends, colleagues, and passersby took to sewing machines, many for the first time, to transform their frustration and pain into objects of protest, community solidarity, and resistance.