One of the most resounding forces across the globe in the past year has been Black Lives Matter. While the group has existed since 2013 with the same goal of uplifting Black communities and drawing attention to police brutality, it was through the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that the movement saw global traction. And while the ongoing issues of justice and accountability are still a struggle to see met, the organization also finds ways to enhance communities globally, such as with the newly announced Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism in Toronto.

Named after the novel of the same name by author Octavia Butler, the Wildseed Centre was announced as having a new permanent location this past week. Located near the areas of College and Spadina, this inspiring new space finds its home in a 10,000 square foot Victorian home. 

The city of Toronto has put $250,000 towards the project, which involves the transformation of the space by designers Tom Kuo and Helen Yung of Foundation Creative Studio—known for their immersive multi-media designs. Architecture will be directed by Bryan Lee of Colloquate—known for works focussed on protest and progress within New Orleans.

The executive team of Wildseed includes Ravyn Ariah Wngz, Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware, with their staff team comprised of Jessica Kirk, Imani Busby, Mila Natasha Mendez, and Yordanos Haile.

Hudson highlighted the value of having such a large, permanent location for the activities of the Wildseed Centre in a conversation with CBC News:

“Having a space like this that has a level of permanence, that is large, that allows for different types of organizations to come together and create community. It’s going to be a really, really big shift for Black Canada and Black Toronto.”

“Wildseed is a transformed industrial space,” the project’s mission statement reads. “A blank canvas reimagined as a multipurpose artist-run community incubator, gallery, studio and home to Black Lives Matter—Canada. Wildseed is a transfeminist, queer affirming space politically aligned with supporting Black liberation work across Canada.” Serving as an intersectional hub for both artistic and political ventures, it makes sense that the team behind Wildseed identifies with the appropriate and evocative term of “artivists.”

The value of communal spaces of artistry and political action cannot be understated. Especially in a market that has seen more and more art spaces close up over the past year, the fact that Black Lives Matter Canada has secured such an impressive space for the Wildseed Centre is a huge victory for the organization and the city. While it may still be early on, it is clear that this new space will be an inspiring force for creation and activism for Toronto and beyond.

Photoartist Valery Katsuba is already known in the European art and fashion community. Despite the fact that Valery was born in a Belarussian village and his career started in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), where he attended the Maritime Academy, it was the West that established his reputation as an artist. Katsuba’s projects were exhibited in institutions and galleries of Paris, Madrid, London and New York, as well as in Belgium, Mexico and Russia. The artist’s works are in museum collections of the National Centre of Art and Culture of Georges Pompidou, the State Russian Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Museum Center de Arte de 2 de Mayo in Madrid and others.

Finally, the Asian audience will be presented the essence of the artist’s creative process. The personal retrospective exhibition ‘Valery Katsuba: Russian Romantic Realism’ opened in the Shanghai Centre of Photography (SCoP) сo-organised by Anna Nova Gallery and Sarah Vinitz Foundation. For the first time in China the audience will have a chance to enjoy how Katsuba elegantly explores human bodies by means of photography. The occasion was used as an opportunity to write this diptych essay about Katsuba’s art.

De/Construction of Beauty

One of the characteristic features of contemporary art is deconstruction of grand narratives. Beauty as one of such narratives that was dominating in the discursive field of art for a really long time has been discredited. The defamation process began as early as in the Middle Ages but was most evident at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the сlassic aesthetic values were destroyed under the pressure of a new artistic matter, which required modernity. Today, in the 21st century, we can no longer define precisely what is beautiful and what is not. The boundaries of ‘beauty’ are expanding infinitely – or even losing the value totally. Classical aesthetic canons are becoming vestiges of the past. In the time period when values are reassessed, old guidelines are rejected, and new ones are being looked for, Valery Katsuba creates his photographs emanating classical beauty.

The origins of this beauty are to be sought in the cradle of European culture in Ancient Greece and more specifically – in its Classical period. With almost absolute certainty, writer and culture researcher Andrew Solomon calls Katsuba ‘a master of aesthetics’, comparing him to Praxiteles, the most prominent sculptor of Classical Greece. Katsuba’s photographs feature a harmonious understanding of the universe close to the Antique, based on the concepts of Order, Cosmos and Logos. This is what we see in almost every photograph by Katsuba. The artist achieves this through the formal aspect of his works: an arranged composition that follows rules, сlear linearity, color schemes and chiaroscuro, closed forms and space tectonics along with absolute clarity. At the same time, the semantics of his works present a special lightness and as art historian and Antiquity discoverer Johann Winckelmann put it, ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’.

Another important similarity between Katsuba’s artistic world and the Antique is anthropocentricity. Each of Katsuba’s photographs represents people, their beauty, spirits and bodies. And all his characters are endowed with Kalos kagathos., which translated from Ancient Greek means beautiful (καλὸς) and virtuous (ἀγαθός). That is a quality that describes a perfect and complete human personality, harmonious in mind and body. All these principles of formal and semantic modalities impose upon adoption of the classical basis in Katsuba’s photography. He seems to incorporate the values of Classical antiquity in photographic media, and, moreover, if photography had existed in the Classical age, it would have looked like this.

Therefore, Katsuba takes on the classical line in the West European art – the antique tradition that has been pulsing in the body of the European visual culture, slowing down in the Middle Ages, regaining its pace in the Renaissance, fading in the age of the Baroque and the Mannerism, and then rushing on in the Classicism. It is a pleasure to feel this rhythm still throbbing in works by contemporary artists – it means the tradition lives on and beauty keeps revitalizing.

Temporality: Forward into the Past

In a way, there is time present in Katsuba’s photos. Turning to the tradition of the past, Katsuba stays in modernity. In a unique and extraordinary way, his photographs combine Past, Present and Future. Perhaps, such a montage of three tenses that couldn’t have existed in the real world, the two of them being antonymous, introduces a sense of serenity and stillness similar to classical pastorals. Characters of the photographs are frozen in a moment, which is extremely difficult to grasp. Katsuba overcomes impossibility. It is like he visualizes the sentence from Faust – ‘Beautiful moment, do not pass away!’

Moreover, Katsuba is interested in the relative non-variability of landscapes — whether it be a natural or architectural landscape — and historical events passing through them, as well as human fates and faces. As the artist himself says, ‘I ask my heroes to stop. And they stop in front of the camera like an infinity of time and space, revealing greatness, beauty and fragility’. His photographs become a kind of a historical or an artistic narrative, a visual myth — like bas-reliefs of an ancient temple.

In his works, Katsuba presents the past not only in its aesthetics, but also in its physical modality. The artist’s interest in photographic and film archives has had an impact on his work — archival objects became a starting point for the photographic series. For example, the ‘Art Academy’ series appeared thanks to a photo found in the archives. It depicted a life drawing class in Professor Makovsky’s studio taken by Karl Bulla in 1914 at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. Photographs of the daily life of St. Petersburg sports societies that had existed in the pre-revolutionary times in the early 20th century became the artist’s inspiration for the ‘Phisculture’ series.

On the one hand, Katsuba refers to the aesthetics of the past, but on the other hand, this past becomes a model for the new future. By placing his contemporaries in the frame of a lens, the artist creates a reenactment of classical ideal images of Antiquity, Renaissance and Classicism of today. Reviving these traditions and using them to construct a world of his own, Valery Katsuba chooses the path of nostalgy. The artist does not deny that nostalgia becomes one of the important substrates for his photographic works. The artistic world is not only made of his adoration of the past, but also of his personal dreams and memories. Katsuba believes that as children we used to experience endless happiness. ‘In my photos, there are traces of those images that I used to find pleasant and that used to give me a sense of peace, comfort and confidence. I recall the words of a former French Minister of Culture François Mitterrand who said that this was the case when nostalgia became contemporary art’, Katsuba says.

So, Katsuba’s photographic world compiles historical and cultural experience, but it asks the viewer an urgent question, the one everyone has to answer on their own. That is, Katsuba’s view is a priori retrospective, but it opens a new perspective to the audience. And the most unusual and worthwhile thing is that the world to which Katsuba invites us is all charged with nostalgia – not for a certain time period but for lost harmony.

The past year has seen its fair share of recorded theatre. With it as the primary means of consumption for the medium, companies have been able to show off their high-end archival footage and push resources towards polished digital content. But with little more than two cameras, quite possibly one of the most impactful pieces of recorded theatre this past year is Lincoln Center Theatre’s Marys Seacole. A dive into the life of legendary Jamaican-British medical practitioner Mary Seacole, this production captures lightning from a raw, living, breathing, bleeding work of art.

Written by Brooklyn-based playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marys Seacole sees the iconic historical figure presenting the story of her life and career during the Crimean War of the 1850s while jumping into the present day to follow the lives of others navigating medical work, womanhood, and the nature of care. Drury weaves a fluid structure for the two worlds to blur together and gives a magnetic quality to the titular nurse who is so oft overlooked beside her wartime counterpart Florence Nightingale. A beautifully natural quality flows through the words, and the script unflinchingly tackles issues of racism, sexism, and death.

Gabby Beans and Marceline Hugot as Mamie and Merry; courtesy of Lincoln Center Theatre.

Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction taps into all of the potent energies of Drury’s script and runs with them. A thread of chaos is sewn throughout—through overlapping speech, vocal outbursts, lighting, sound—and there is a clear intent to exert any amount of control over it. This chaos and its containment tightly capture the volatile nature of medicine, whether in wartime or the present day. Blain-Cruz uses the space and bodies inspiringly, creating intimacy and intangible space as the framework ebbs and flows, and there isn’t a moment where the drive of the production falters.

It goes without saying that the cast of Marys Seacole performed astoundingly. The six women on stage commanded the very essences of strength and vulnerability in equal measure. Quincy Tyler Bernstine (who wows as the legendary Seacole), Gabby Beans, Karen Kandel, Marceline Hugot, Lucy Taylor, and Ismenia Mendes all had incredibly difficult jobs to do—channelling some of the most fraught circumstances and visceral emotions at a whiplash pace, on top of breaking down on the regular. Every one of them accomplished that job and more, giving inspiring performances deserving of this fascinating and necessary work.

Karen Kandel and Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Duppy Mary and Mary; courtesy of Lincoln Center Theatre.

There is a sort of magic that pervades Marys Seacole, a seemingly intentional conjuring. From the opening monologue, there is a Wiccan quality to Bernstine’s speech and the way she is framed. Karen Kandel’s silent, looming matron exerts great influence over moments and the way the different realities bleed into each other rings of something otherworldly. It’s a potent concept sewn into a figure whose background in healing came from traditional Jamaican herbalist methods, evidently shunned in her time and beyond for both her methods and heritage. This magic quality is no more evident than in the ending, where the plurality of Mary abounds. Each character has a Mary-adjacent name, and in unison speech, the group of women reiterate Mary’s speech from the beginning in which she states: “Me, I, me give power to meself”. They radiate with the power of a coven and exemplify the strength of Mary Seacole.

Lincoln Center Theatre honed in on a true gem with Marys Seacole. A pertinent and powerful piece of theatre, it serves up a lesser-known slice of history that enchants with its depth. While its ongoing relevance in the world at large is evidence of how many faults still go unchecked, there is a resilient empowerment to the work that does not dishearten. To say the least, the treatment this show administers will stay with you for a long time.