aNIQUE jORDAN biography

 

Award-winning artist, writer and curator, Anique Jordan, looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. Working for over a decade at the crossroad of community economic development and art, Jordan’s practice stems from and returns to the communities that inform it. As an artist, Jordan’s work plays with the foundations of traditional Trinidadian carnival and the theory of hauntology challenging historical narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. She works across temporalities bringing historical data towards a contemporary analysis. This work creates space to reinterpret the archives offering a new and speculative vision of the future.

Jordan’s curatorial practice centres around opening access points for engagement from new and unexpected audiences. She is interested in ways space and power operate within a curated site and how questions can shift and subvert depending on whose gaze is privileged. Jordan’s curatorial work has been seen at the Art Gallery of Ontario where she co-curated the groundbreaking exhibition, Every.Now.Then: Reframing Nationhood with Andrew Hunter, at UCLA in California and Liberty Hall in Jamaica where she produced Song for the Beloved with Dr. Honor Ford-Smith, at NIA Centre for the Arts where she curated, The Marvelous are Here and as part of a site specific series, The Public: Land and Body.

Jordan has lectured on her artistic and community engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas including University of the West Indies, MIT, University of Toronto and UCLA. She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, participating in residencies around the world and exhibiting in galleries such as Art Gallery of Guelph, University of Toronto, the Wedge Curatorial Project, Art Gallery of Windsor, Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of York University, Gallery 44, and Y+ Contemporary. She is represented in public and private collections nationally, including the Wedge Collection, Toronto Dominion Bank, and the University of Toronto.

In 2017 Jordan was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the year award, she recently completed a 2017-2018 artist residency at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago) and is the 2018-19 Osgoode Hall Law School Artist-in-Residence.

Image: These Times, archival print on hahnemühle photo rag baryta, 2019. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.