Timothy Yanick Hunter: Past/Present/Future Sense

When coronavirus was in its initial throes, I, like so many others, was consuming every Zoom talk and YouTube/Instagram live hosted by individuals, universities, and organizations that might provide some perspective, some guidance, on how to comprehend where we were and where we were headed. Arundhati Roy’s discussion with Imani Perry via Haymarket Books titled The Pandemic is a Portal¹ is a conversation that I keep returning to. Roy’s idea that this radical rupture, this shared moment of global upheaval, was an opening, an opportunity to shed our systems of dysfunction and despotism, seemed almost impossibly optimistic.

But if I learned anything from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower², it was that survival, hope, and transformation are created from little actions, a gathering of seeds, a sharing of song and story, a continuation in the face of certain death. Continuation for Black folks, for us on the margins, in the face of certain death has been a long, painful, and relentless march. The pandemic sparked universal questioning. No longer were we alone or nudged to the sidelines in our struggles. Individual and widespread actions of radical care have cracked open new palpable realities.

I first met Timothy Yanick Hunter in 2016 at the inaugural Black Artists Union (BAU) exhibition at a small gallery in Kensington Market. As one of the founding members of BAU, Hunter’s curiosity and focus on shared practices continues to resonate. Working in many forms from performance installation, music/sampling, poetry, video collage, to experimenting with artificial intelligence, it’s become clear that Hunter creates portals: openings that collapse time and unite the past with the future to reflect divergent spaces of respite.

From the group exhibition he contributed to and curated, “A Complete Change Of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State” (2019) presented at Cooper Cole Gallery, to the recent solo exhibition “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Everything” (2020) curated by Sarah-Tai Black at A Space Gallery, along with his regularly shifting website trueandfunctional.com, Hunter lays visible a praxis of tem- poral experimentation and collective care. In his recent publication No More Important Time Than The Present (2020), published by BlackMass Publishing (NY), he begins with an urgent call and a warning as he writes:

Don’t underestimate your enemies’ mechanisms—you cannot ignore the mortal danger. But also understand that you’ve died once, and died again, and will continue to die until you become privy to your inherent beauty.³

He urges us to understand the gravity of what we face and to recognize that joy, desire, perseverance, and suffering are so often intertwined with our self worth. Our sense of belonging (particularly when identifying as Black Canadian) is often precarious, and the constant and now heightened battle against systems of oppression has caused a profound fatigue. Hunter’s instructions, ceremonies, and samplings usher us through a portal of reflection to find a future that surpasses simply surviving.

Using archival video footage projected onto circular screens (portals), print collage layered on top of photocopied texts, with ambient audio of ‘90s R&B samples mixed by Hunter, his work culminates in visceral and ethereal jump-cut narratives. Video mashups of kids playing, athletes competing and artists disclosing their process, manifests visualization that reflect the divergent strategies and accomplishments of Black liberation. The mashups also act as signs alluding to what author VéVé A. Clark defines as a diasporic literacy.⁴ As scholar Katherine McKitterick writes in Dear Science and Other Stories,

These literacies function to expand the text outside itself (the prompt opens a door)… they cue what does not need explanation but requires imagination and memory and study. Diasporic literacy signals ways of being and ways of living (memories, imaginations, mnemonics), that we know and share in order to collectively struggle against suffocating racial logics.⁵

Hunter is reminding us of what we inherently know: that time and space have always been amorphous. In the worlds he conjures, our labour and our dreams have eternally been united with our ancestors and surpass basic survival within societies of oppression. In a time where our human physical presence is hyper-realized and limited, when corporeal experi- ences must be mitigated, Hunter has created forms that attend to our bodies, to our psyches and passions, and opens portals of liberation—ways of being tangibly and virtually connected.

Timothy Yanick Hunter is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Toronto, Canada. Hunter’s practice employs strategies of bricolage to examine non-neutral relationships relating to Black and Afro-diasporic experiences as well as concurrent strategies of decolonization. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic with a focus on the political, cultural, and social richness of the Black Diaspora. Hunter’s work often delves into speculative narratives and the intersections of physical space, digital space, and the intangible.

Liz Ikiriko is a biracial Nigerian Canadian artist and curator. Her practice is focused on African and diasporic narratives. She is committed to the creation of embodied experiences that utilize accessible platforms to share moments of vulnerability and care for all of us on the margins. She is the curator of “Is Love a Synonym for Abolition?,” a feature exhibition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (May 2021) presenting works by Timothy Yanick Hunter and Isabel Okoro, presented at Gallery 44 in Toronto. She is Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University.

1. Arundhati Roy, The Pandemic is a Portal, YouTube, Haymarket Books, 23 April 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmQLTnK4QTA.
2. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Warner Books, 1995).
3. Timothy Yanick Hunter, No More Important Time Than The Present (New York: BlackMass Publishing, 2020), 1.
4. “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Condé’s Hérémakhonon,” Out of the Kumbla: Womanist Perspectives on Caribbean Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1989), 315–31.
5. Katherine McKitterick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2021), 6.

This article is published in issue 38.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue