CreativeMornings Ottawa, May 2021: Resilient
How did you celebrate YOUR ninth birthday?
Maybe there was a pony ride, bouncy castle or even – eep! – a clown.
We can’t promise the CreativeMornings Ottawa ninth birthday celebration will include all (or really, any) of these things. But what we can promise you is a slew of birthday surprises and a theme that’s appropriate for a chapter that’s stuck around for nine years: Resilient.
That’s right – CreativeMornings Ottawa will mark its ninth birthday in May 2021. So shine up those dancing shoes and prepare that confetti gun because we’ll all be coming together to celebrate (virtually) on May 28, 2021.
To mark the occasion, we’ll welcome Nigerian-Canadian visual artist Kosisochukwu Nnebe to the virtual stage so she can share her exploration of the concept of resiliency.
But that’s not all.
To mark the birthday occasion, the CreativeMornings team has planned nine special birthday surprises. Three of these surprises – a highlight of those contributing creative work under the #OttawaIsCreative hashtag, a special meditation session with registered social worker Jessica Lemieux, a special colouring contest and a Dominion City Brewing Co. sampling pack giveaway – have already been announced.
What’s next? You’ll need to stay tuned to the CreativeMornings Ottawa Instagram feed to see!
CreativeMornings Ottawa has its own relationship with the theme of resiliency, having stuck around Ottawa for so long after kicking off in 2012.
“To be resilient is to be adaptable. It’s a way of being that’s flexible and alive, bouncing with the stuff of survival: learning, evolving and intertwining our roots to share resources and to create a strong anchor of collective care. Like trees in a storm, it means swaying instead of snapping.”
So reads this month’s theme note from CreativeMornings HQ.
But it could just as easily apply to this month’s speaker, Kosisochukwu Nnebe.
Interrogating the common trope of resiliency so often associated with the resistance, success, or mere survival of marginalized groups against all odds, Kosisochukwu will unpack her own relationship with the word, from her recovery from burnout to the ways in which she has seen the term be used to not only hide but also perpetuate structural and systemic inequities. Drawing on her work as both a visual artist and a policy analyst, she will explore alternative readings of what it means to be resilient, including, potentially, moving towards a focus on that which is regenerative instead.
An economist by training and a policy analyst by profession, Kosisochukwu’s art practice aims to engage viewers on issues both personal and structural in ways that bring awareness to their own complicity. Through her interactive and installation-based pieces, audiences are made hyperaware of their positionality within the physical space of a room, as in society, and how this shapes what is seen and unseen, what is understood and what remains undecipherable.
Kosisochukwu’s work has been exhibited at AXENEO7, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Place des Arts, the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Nia Centre, Studio Sixty Six, Z-Art Space, Station 16, and the Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California. She has given presentations on her artistic practice and research at universities across Quebec, including Laval, McGill and Concordia, and has facilitated workshops at the National Gallery of Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and Redwood City High School in California.
