About
MISSION
Dark Opacities Lab is subtitled “a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy” as a means to signal this work as centering the work of people of color and to our political commitments as they precede the aesthetic. It is in this centering of the political that we must understand that a commitment to the work of racial justice comes out of politics, emerges from not only the consciousness of the general antagonism, but has already picked a side. It is in this way that the lab approaches politics as ethics, the choosing of sides, the work of radical consciousness that requires forms of study and organizing not always available at the school, at the university. Perhaps evident, this structural logic borrows from an anti-colonial politics and ethics that is, too, informed by the writing of Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons.
More practically, Dark Opacities Lab operates in three dimensions: the first of which is Dark Study/Dark Studio: a dual-purpose community reading room and informal zine-making space; secondly is Dark Continuum: an interactive digital hub; and third, Dark Display: in the form of small-scale exhibitions by minoritarian artists, theorists, practitioners. With Dark Study, we orient around forms of study that include research clusters based on bi/tri-annual themes; hand-in-hand is Dark Studio, which we use to produce as a means to help create and design a zine for publication and circulation every semester, so twice yearly.
Dark Continuum will be our connection to the world outside of the university and outside of Montréal. It is this website. Through this site, we imagine there will be ways for us to connect with individuals and groups in academia, in the arts, and in activist organizing. Finally, Dark Display is constituted by the long-term project of the lab’s themes to culminate in forms of small-scale shows of our work across themes of two to three years each: from visual art to text-based forms of engagement; from study sessions to short film screenings, Dark Opacities Lab aims to cultivate and innovate on what constitutes display and itself.
Lab Structure
THE COLLECTIVE
Dark Opacities Lab collective is the primary organizing body of the lab. The Collective is responsible for both short-term and long-term planning and projects for the labs, within and outside of the themes, as well as internal forms of study, creation, writing, and experimentation. They work collaboratively in the spirit of the lab: one that is both intersectional and internationalist in its approach to the intersections of art and racial justice.
Current
Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Concordia University
Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Colelctive. Singh has been published in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED, Surveillance and Society, Rhizomes, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Spectra, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas.
Assistant Professor of Communication Design and Visual Culture, Design and Computation Arts Department, Concordia University
Founder and Creative Director, LOKI
Kevin works at the intersections of graphic design, cultural production, and social change with a research focus on publication practices and social movements. His research is invested in exploring the tensions between material and relational studies of design as a means of fostering greater social and political autonomy. Kevin founded the graphic design studio LOKI in 2014, working alongside community organizations, non-profits, cultural and educational institutions, unions, artists, researchers and activist groups, as part of broader movements for social change. Kevin holds an MA in Typographic Design from the London College of Printing (UAL). Prior to founding LOKI, he worked in interactive design, advertising and fashion. He is a member of the Memefest network and the Justseeds artist co-operative. Kevin is the author of Design Against Design: Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice (2024) with Set Margins’ Press.
PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, Concordia University
Marcela Torres Molano is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She has a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a Master’s in urban design for development. With a keen interest in multidisciplinary research, Marcela focuses on the intersection of urban studies, community-based art, and feminisms. Her doctoral research investigates the work of Colombian women artists collaborating with communities to address violence arising from neoliberal and war environments. Besides her academic research, Marcela has worked in community-based urban design, education and art projects; all centered on advocating for gender and social justice.
PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, Concordia University
Setayesh Nejadi is a researcher specializing in contemporary art and architecture. Currently pursuing her PhD at Concordia University and working as a researcher at Dark Opacities Lab, her work focuses on the informal and everyday forms of resistance against government control and surveillance in the Global South, especially Iran. With a background in architecture, she explores how architecture and urban design can become a means of control over bodies, while simultaneously examining how people use these same means to reclaim and reconstruct their forms of presence, existence, and expression within urban environments.
THE SURROUNDS
Drawing from AbdouMaliq Simone’s book of the same name, The Surrounds is Dark Opacities Lab’s Steering Committee. It is primarily composed of Concordia faculty and graduate students, along with three at-large members. The Surrounds helps weigh in on, shape, and guide major lab decisions and directions. In addition, the Surrounds members are invited to share their own work for a colloquium or workshop, or to co-host an event related to one of the two planned themes for the lab.
May Chew teaches at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and the Department of Art History. Her research focuses on interactive and immersive technologies in diverse museum and exhibit spaces across Canada, and how these technologies facilitate the material practice of nation and cultural citizenship. Chew has collaborated on Houses on Pengarth, a research and curation project centred on developing a socially-engaged, experimental art lab in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights community. Before coming to Concordia, she received her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts & Technology. Her recent work includes a chapter in the anthology Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press, 2015); articles in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History; and Public 57: Archives/Counter-Archives, which she co-edited with Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault.
[from his website]
A Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, film programmer and film editor from Jordan, currently based in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal). ElKhairy holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University. He has won the Peter Lenkov Award for Script Writing, 2018. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries including Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Kaunas International Film Festival, Toronto Palestine Film Festival and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery.
Dr. Joana Joachim is Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art Education, Art History and Social Justice. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her manuscript in progress,There/Then, Here/Now (working title), examines investigates practices of self-preservation and self-care through the lens of Black livingness and creolization in the visual culture of Black women’s hair and dress in both historical and contemporary art practices. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. Dr. Joachim obtained her Master’s degree in Museology from Université de Montréal and her BFA from University of Ottawa. In 2020 she was appointed as a McGill Provostial Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Institutional Histories, Slavery and Colonialism.
Jenny Lin is a visual artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal. Working with experimental narrative and autobiographical fiction, primarily in the form of print-based installations, artists’ books and zines, Lin is drawn to the socio-political, accessible and community-based aspects of print and zine-making, self-publishing and self-distribution. Lin uses drawing and text as a way to process life experiences and current events, parsing situations into sequences that invite viewers’ interpretation, projection and connection. She has collaborated with Eloisa Aquino as B&D Press, a queer art and micropress project, since 2009.
Assistant Professor of Communication Design and Visual Culture, Design and Computation Arts Department, Concordia University
Founder and Creative Director, LOKI
Kevin works at the intersections of graphic design, cultural production, and social change with a research focus on publication practices and social movements. His research is invested in exploring the tensions between material and relational studies of design as a means of fostering greater social and political autonomy. Kevin founded the graphic design studio LOKI in 2014, working alongside community organizations, non-profits, cultural and educational institutions, unions, artists, researchers and activist groups, as part of broader movements for social change. Kevin holds an MA in Typographic Design from the London College of Printing (UAL). Prior to founding LOKI, he worked in interactive design, advertising and fashion. He is a member of the Memefest network and the Justseeds artist co-operative. Kevin is the author of Design Against Design: Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice (2024) with Set Margins’ Press.
Po B. K. Lomami explores how superhumanization is physically and mentally inscribed, the construction of superperformance, and the possibilities of investing it, exposing it, and reclaiming it to create other possible futures as a black disabled person. Lomami’s work and failure are informed by Afrofuturistic, crip, mad, and bodymind principles. They turn to a variety of materials like mental and physical movements, their medical experience, treatment, and information, and diverted devices or communication technologies. Mimicking or rearranging institutional aspects is a strategy they use to immerse and challenge the audience and put it to work.
Allan E. S. Lumba is a cultural and social historian of Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines. He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City.” This new project has recently received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024-2026).
In the broadest and truest sense, Matthias’ research is best described as a sustained engagement with Amiri Baraka’s liner notes for the album Live at Birdland (1964) by John Coltrane, with specific attention to Baraka’s refusal of regulatory logics that formulate beauty as inextricably linked to terror. His writing was most recently featured in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora where he contributed an analysis of Cecil Taylor’s critical reception in Paris during the late 1960s. He has presented his research at a variety of academic conferences spanning the fields of Film Studies, Black Studies, Improvisation Studies, and Jazz Studies. Embracing constant preparation as a precondition for slipping with the music as it slips from our grasp, Matthias spends his days meditating on the distinction—or lack thereof—between montage and ensemble, while rigorously celebrating free jazz’s appeal to a different formulation of time, space and being all/together. He is a PhD student in Film & Moving Image Studies at Concordia University.
University of Toronto Mississauga
Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on the visual culture of American militarism, with a focus on document redaction, transparency, and the archives of state violence. Her current book project, A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War, is a critical reckoning with the racial and imperial work of paper as mobilized in the service of American militarism. Nath’s research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the University of California office of the President, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Her essays and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Studies in Documentary Film, Visual Anthropology and elsewhere. Nath co-edits the newly inaugurated Critical Militarization Studies book series on University of Michigan Press, with Dr. Crystal Baik. Prior to joining the faculty at UTM, Nath held positions at University of California, Davis and the American University of Beirut.
Sue Shon, Ph.D. is. Her research and teaching interests include critical race and ethnic studies, aesthetic theory, and diasporic literatures and visual cultures. She is currently working on a monograph, Racial Sense and the Making of Aesthetic Modernity, which tells the story of how race acquired a visual feel due to constraints in the language of modern human perception. Sue received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and B.A. in Fine Arts and English from the University of Pennsylvania.
Mélinda Pierre-Paul Cardinal is a PhD student in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, specializing in Black studies, visual art, and literature. She holds a BFA and MA in Art History as well as a Graduate Diploma in Communications from Concordia University. Her research constellates the work of contemporary Black diasporic artists and writers that reimagine Black life boundlessly, beyond the logics of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Adopting a Black feminist framework rooted in methods of opacity, she explores how reading such work across and alongside one another can reveal strategies for living Blackness differently in the still unfolding aftermaths of transatlantic slavery.
THE CONSTELLATION
Dark Opacities Lab’s Constellation is a network of non-local lab members, relations, and interlocutors. Such affiliation with the lab enables possible modes of connection across Turtle Island, and Constellation members are invited to attend or help organize virtual or hybrid webinars, teach-ins, and workshops. In addition, like the Surrounds, Constellation members are invited to share their own work for a colloquium or workshop, or to co-host an event related to one of the two planned themes for the lab in-person as well.
Dr. M. Aziz (Uh-Zeez), (pronouns: they/them/theirs), is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Aziz received their Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in African American Studies from Columbia University. Their first book asks how folks who practiced unarmed self-defense and martial arts contributed to Black Power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation, abolition, and gender norms. It also traces how the learning of martial arts was facilitated by U.S. militarism during the Cold War. In 2022, they received the V.P. Franklin Legacy Journal of African American History Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life for their article, “They Punch Black: They Punched Black: Martial Arts, Black Arts, and Sports in the Urban North and West, 1968-1979.” As a TGNC scholar-activist, Aziz regularly teaches radically inclusive self-defense classes in person and virtually.
Director, Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life
Dartmouth College
Kimberly Juanita Brown serves as the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of contemporary literatures of the Black diaspora and visual culture studies. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015), and Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024). Brown is currently completing her third book, Black Elegies, about the art of mourning in contemporary cultural productions. She is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color scholars, artists, and curators whose work examines critical race theory and visual culture studies. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing.
Associate Professor, Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California – Santa Cruz
micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press (2022), proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is a first generation Colombian American.
Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies. Her scholarship attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production and to the study of race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. She is working on a book-length project that examines literature and performance to explore the ways black folks manage racial terror through a sense of humor endowed with black feminist affects like curiosity or a sense of political legitimacy imagined to be possible even among morally, materially, and politically opposing figures. Recent collaborative projects also include a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns as well as a co-edited double-volume anthology entitled Abolition Feminisms (Haymarket Books).
Vivian L. Huang is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University, specializing in race and performance studies.. Her first book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, theorizes minoritarian aesthetics of inscrutability in contemporary Asian American literary, visual, and performance cultures. Surface Relations comes out December 2022 with Duke University Press, where it has been awarded the Scholars of Color First Book Award. Vivian’s peer-reviewed articles can be found in The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Asian American Studies, Women & Performance, and Diacritics. Their latest work connects Asian American lesbian feminist writings of the 1980s and 90s to contemporary queer and trans of color critique.
Ren-yo Hwang’s interdisciplinary teaching and research include courses and scholarship in queer- and transgender-of-color critique, feminist-of-color anti-violence initiatives and genealogies, abolition, transformative justice and community accountability. Hwang’s current scholarship examines carceral technologies of control and punishment, antiviolence reform-based state partnerships of the late 20th century, and discourses concerning the identification of violence. Hwang’s first monograph offers a critical interdisciplinary study of anti-violence strategies — namely hate crimes policy, data and community policing — against queer- and transgender of color survivor-based practices at the margins of mainstream politics in Los Angeles, California over three critical decades (1980s to 2010s). They have published scholarship in Transgender Studies Quarterly and Critical Ethnic Studies Journal.
Malav Kanuga is a cultural anthropologist trained in ethnographic and archival studies of space, culture, and power, as well as uneven development in an internationalist and historical framework. As an urban researcher and as an activist, his work on the cultures and histories of popular mobilization and imagination attends to the articulations and resistances to domination and hierarchy in the urban and social lifeworlds of racial capitalism.
His current research focuses on and accompanies organizing around carcerality, freedom, and public democratic media citizenship. He is interested in how and what communities communicate as they mobilize, and how movements leverage established as well as grassroots media opportunities to change narratives shaping both the policies governing consent and constraint, and the politics and legacies of liberation.
Katherine Lennard is a U.S. historian who studies the material culture of race in the wake of the Civil War. Her monograph, Manufacturing the Ku Klux Klan: Robes, Race, and the Birth of an Icon (UNC Press), examines the garments worn by multiple generations of Klan members to track changing ideas about the Klan’s role in American social life. With a particular focus on factory-made Klan uniforms, which can be identified in archives through distinctive patterns of stitching and marking, this book traces the networks of manufacturing, distribution, and memorialization of these garments—from Georgia factories to Montana rallies to Indiana museums—to provide a new perspective on the enduring and transcontinental legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Bakirathi Mani is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of English. Her areas of interest include Asian American, American, and South Asian Studies; visual cultural studies; museum and curatorial studies; postcolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer of color theory; and interdisciplinary methods of research in comparative race and ethnic studies. She is a Core Faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Penn. Her book, Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Duke University Press, 2020), earned an Honorable Mention Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2022. Unseeing Empire considers how empire continues to haunt contemporary photographic representations of South Asians in America, shaping both aesthetic forms of racial self-representation as well as how diasporic viewers claim and identify with these images. Weaving ethnographic work at museums across North America and in South Asia together with her own experience as a curator, Mani examines the limits of visibility and visuality for Asian Americans. She is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Naveen Minai holds a PhD in gender studies from UCLA and specializes in transnational sexuality studies, queer and trans masculinities of color, transnational visual and literary cultures of North America and South Asia, and diaspora studies. She has been a research/teaching fellow at Sciences Po, Paris (2018), and is currently a research fellow at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory at the University of Toronto, and a Visiting Scholar at the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her current work is on digital archives, sexualities, and queer affect within a transnational framework.
Dr. Neelofer Qadir is a scholar and teacher of contemporary literary and cultural studies of the Global South with a focus on the Indian Ocean world. Currently, she’s working on her first book, Afrasian Imaginaries: Global Capitalism and Labor Migration in Indian Ocean Fiction, 1990 – 2015, which moves beyond familiar colonizer-colonized binaries to examine the dynamic multidirectional longue durée exchanges among Indian Ocean communities. A second project on terror/isms investigates the intersections of global capitalism and carceral statecraft through an archive of literature (poetry, memoir, fiction), political speeches and government documents, and digital/social media.
Sarita Echavez See is Professor of English at the University of California Riverside. Her research and teaching interests range across the interdisciplines of empire and postcolonial studies, critical race studies, theories of gender and sexuality, narrative, and minoritized art, media, and performance. She is the author of the monographs The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York University Press, 2017; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018). She co-edited the anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016). She is at work on a book tentatively titled “Make Do” about contemporary Filipino American artists and small businesses that create and exhibit visual culture through modes of inventive survival.
Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Mount Holyoke College
Dr. Sarah Stefana Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar and visual artist. Their research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer theory and affect studies, visuality and aesthetics. Dr. Smith is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Born to two Brooklyn, New York natives, and growing up in the planned communities of Columbia, Maryland, their creative work explores the intersection of repair and disrepair, aesthetics and visuality in difference (e.g. race, gender, sexuality).
Wendy Sung is assistant professor of race, visuality, and digital culture in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. An interdisciplinary scholar and educator trained in critical ethnic studies, digital and media studies, and American studies, her work sits at the intersection of comparative histories of racialization in the U.S., transmedia histories and digital culture, and the dynamics of visuality and cultural memory. Her first book project, Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media examines the relationships between race, technology, and media cultures through the phenomenon of watching racial violence in 20th and 21st century American culture. She is also at work on a second book project tentatively titled, Faciality/Raciality: The Asian Face as Technological Object, which examines the ways that the Asian face, in its racialized logics of non-recognition—indistinguishability and inscrutability— functions as an unacknowledged foundational subject for facial recognition technologies.
Location
Physical Location:
For room number, please email info@darkopacitieslab.com
Engineering and Visual Arts (EV) Complex
Sir George Williams (SGW) Campus
Concordia University
Mailing Address:
Dark Opacities Lab
c/o Dr. Balbir K. Singh
Department of Art History, EV 3.809
1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8
Canada
CONTACT
info@darkopacitieslab.com
Instagram: @darkopacitieslab
X: @darkopacities