window Winnipeg: An interview with Noor Bhangu, Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Sarah Nesbitt

Noor Bhangu, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, and Sarah Nesbitt have been co-programming window, a six-foot by six-foot by one-foot space for experimental and site-responsive presentations of contemporary art, together since 2019. The venue calls itself “Winnipeg’s only 24-hour artist- run centre.” Located in an exterior vitrine at the base of Artspace—a massive six-story block of a building—window is simultaneously always and never open. Facing the sidewalk at Bannatyne and Arthur, there is a certain serendipity to its audience, which can be the artists and administrators who work at Artspace, or those drawn in while walking or wheeling by.

window began showing work when its initiator, Kegan McFadden, gained access to the vitrine through a building manager in 2012. “It is expected that window will cease operations May 2014,” he wrote in introducing the site.¹ Influenced by a DIY artist-run ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, McFadden tells me that he wanted to work on a project “without the burden of a lot of overhead, nor with the expectation of legacy,” and so window began with this semi-ominous built-in self-destruction date.² He passed window on to Bhangu, who was then a first-year graduate student, when he left for Vancouver in 2017. The transition was unceremonious. “He handed me the keys to window and said, ‘This is yours; I trust you, do whatever you want with it,’” she tells me.³

Nine years and fifty exhibitions have passed through window since its opening. The site has outlasted its planned obsolescence, shifting and adjusting to the visions of its inheritors as time has passed. Bhangu, Muñoz Gomez, and Nesbitt’s approach to the space has been defined by the strength of its collaborations. In the hollow cavity only marginally larger than the arm span of an average human body, the group has attempted to not monopolize space or make it scarce. Instead, by opening up window to guest programmers, and by initiating collaboration and production between artists and curators that form beyond the spatial confines of the vitrine, they’ve expanded the capacity of the site generatively.

As the group’s collaboration on window is coming to a close, I spoke with them to reflect on the space they inherited, their ways of working, and their thoughts on the future of the site.

Lodoe Laura: window was a space that you inherited. What were some decisions you made initially when you started working together?

Noor Bhangu: When I received the keys to the space, window had never applied for funding and never received it. I decided to work with other people to share the financial responsibilities and apply for grants. While Kegan had set up the practice of paying artists for each installation out of his own pocket, I wanted to see if we could increase this without relying on our personal finances. As a master’s student, applying even for local and provincial funding was a daunting task at that time. I brought in Sarah and Mariana, whose work I admired, and when we started talking initially, we thought about gender and body as a common curatorial theme. Of course, we enter those ideas differently, but the aim is to have different installations throughout our collaborative period and then to reflect back on it at the end.

Mariana Muñoz Gomez: As an emerging curator, I was really excited to have this opportunity to join Noor and Sarah in programming window. Grants also felt daunting to me, and, in fact, the grants we got for window were the first artistic grants I was part of writing and securing. From our initial conversations, we decided to distribute the various kinds of workloads for this project as much as we could, while also being there for each other to step in as needed. We also decided to work with an installation assistant to help us manage the workload, and we’ve been able to work with local artists Sarah Stewart and Kristina Banera.

Sarah Nesbitt: The first thing that we were really adamant about is that it didn’t make sense to be curating that space without funding. As we were putting together applications, we were finding ways to fill the space without having to underpay or not pay artists. We developed partnerships with a few different institutions to fill the gaps while we were working on securing provincial and municipal funding. Initially, we thought we’d try to think of the year as an extended group exhibition and to curate in that way collectively, but as it played out more, we let go of that idea and just allowed each other to pursue relationships with artists that we were interested in working with.

LL: What are some of the challenges that have come with working with funding bodies for window?

NB: We prefer thinking through processes rather than determining what our next two years are going to be like. It’s a challenge because we don’t necessarily want to end this chapter that we’ve been working on for the last year and a half and just move on to another curatorial theme. I see that as an issue because it’s an experimental space where we want to remain open to chance and new forms of presentation, but we have to validate our methodologies for the jury.

LL: Other than funding, what are some of the ways you’re addressing the space you inherited?

SN: When we first announced our collaboration, we were approached by a local Anishinaabe curator who pointed out that window had only exhibited one Indigenous artist up until then. She shared that what she was calling for goes beyond performative curating, and urged us to think seriously about how we share power and authority in this space. Because of the wonderful legacy we inherited from Kegan and Divya, this tiny space holds a surprising amount of cultural capital. We were really happy to have this come to us right as we began our collaboration and started speaking immediately about ways we might address these concerns seriously. This seems especially important in a city like Winnipeg, which is so central to colonial history in so-called Canada, as the homeland of the Métis, and, in contemporary times, where structural racism continues to make Indigenous peoples more vulnerable through harmful institutions such as the foster care system and intentionally uneven urban design. As a site that occupies public space at street level in Winnipeg, and in the Exchange District—which sits at a bit of an interstitial space in the city, between some of the wealthier neighbourhoods and the city’s notorious North End—we understood the need to address the ways window historically, and in our current collaboration, needed to make real space for these conversations.

LL: window is a public-facing part of the Artspace building. How does its position and visibility affect how you’re thinking about the space?

MMG: I feel like there aren’t a lot of emerging art spaces in Winnipeg right now. There are a few, but there’s been activ- ity in the last number of years responding to that, people wanting to see more space for local artists and for emerg- ing artists. I guess I’m still figuring out how I feel about this aspect of window—it’s a window, so it’s right there and it’s in the public. You can walk by it and see it. But it can also be kind of a happenstance if you walk by it without knowing that it’s there. That’s kind of lovely in its own way, but I also wonder what comes with that chance encounter. I’m sure there are people that would be interested in the work that’s there, but that don’t necessarily know that it’s there.

LL: You’ve tried to foster a collaborative spirit around window, by bringing in guest curators and initiating collaborations between artists too. This seems critical to your approach.

NB: Each new curator has brought in their own research interests and artistic networks to the space which really expands and pushes us into new directions and keeps the space relevant and interesting—maybe not to the same community that was fostered around it five years ago but one that is growing in its place. Again, this will change after we leave and window is taken up by others. We have also found it incredibly valuable to partner/mentor emerging curators with interests and cultural locations other than our own. I think this was most profound by the longer takeover by the guest curatorial team, Mahlet Cuff and Ekene Maduka, over the summer of 2020. Amidst the local and global Black Lives Matter movements, they were focusing on Black artists and cultural practitioners through the affects of joy and pleasure as resistance. This curatorial turn brought new audiences to window and allowed window to stand in for something different than what we had designed for it. This was rewarding but also a learning moment for us—window is most effective when it is multi-vocal and taken up by different people for different aims.

MMG: I agree. Each of us as curators and each guest curator we bring in contribute to shaping window as well as the Winnipeg art and culture scene. It’s very motivating to have this space, and it feels validating to have secured funding to make things happen here. With this financial support, we are able to promote others’ work and support their creative development as well.

SN: I think the strength of the collective is that nobody really has a strong attachment to it. We’re not there to perform anything for ourselves, we’re trying to make it a productive space for the city and we’re really interested in collaboration on a larger scale and creating opportunities for people and mentorship. I think the history of the space has given us opportunities to work with some bigger artists, which is always nice, but then at the same time it is important to also see the city represented and celebrate that. I think we really tried to balance that.

LL: The Exchange District is somewhat of a cultural destination for the city, and I wonder how rapid development might affect a space like window.

NB: In some ways, the Exchange District becoming a cultural destination in the city has been beneficial for window in the past, because it created a lot of foot traffic—folks on their way to bars, restaurants, other exhibitions, back to the bus or their parked cars. window became like a small window into the broader cultural production of the neighbourhood and Artspace in particular. In terms of the precarious nature of running art spaces, we have a yearly contract with Artspace where we rent the space in kind for programming it. I think this is a mutually beneficial relationship as we get to divert our funds to paying artists and producing installations for the space.

MMG: I have many thoughts about this—my perspective of Winnipeg is that it’s difficult for alternative art spaces to pop up here, at least in contrast to the handful of times I’ve visited places like Toronto or Montréal, where it seems like there’s much more activity in creating grassroots exhibition or art spaces (as temporary as they can sometimes be). I think a reason for this is that there is a pattern of people moving away from Winnipeg for various reasons. I believe part of the reason alternative or new art spaces don’t transpire often here is that the desire may be there, but the momentum is lost when there isn’t enough ongoing support from the community.

As well, over the last few years, there have been developments that make me think a small group of wealthy people are trying to turn Winnipeg into Toronto. One thing that pandemic time has highlighted as I occasionally walk through downtown neighbourhoods to spend a day at the office is how some of this construction feels like it’s happening all of a sudden: I walk by a new condo building and remember that the last time I walked by that space, it was just barely started, ambiguous construction.

I think we will see Winnipeg changing drastically over the next number of years, both physically and culturally. On one hand I feel some sort of precarity, thinking about the challenges I’ve noted towards new art spaces popping up. I am five years out of art school now, and when I reflect on my experience as a person of colour who went through art school here, I know it felt very white. I see more young BIPOC artists coming up in the community now who are driven in their creative work, so there is hope for momentum and stimulation for these communities to support the work they want to see and establish new art spaces, and I hope that there is support from allies as well.

LL: Alternative art spaces tend to pop up with enthusiasm and vigour, and I wonder how it might be possible to sustain that energy as time passes. In talking to Kegan, he mentioned the Or Gallery as a model, which, in its early stages, had a mandate that its director change every couple of years. It’s an interesting approach—but maybe you have some other ideas.

NB: For sure, I agree with Kegan that window and most artist-run centres worth their salt should change direction every few years. This is definitely not happening in the Prairies or most of Canada as there are more job insecurities, so people tend to stay for longer periods than they would have done in the ‘80s or ‘90s. I started with window in 2018 as a solo curator and then invited Mariana and Sarah on board in 2019. Now I’m entering 2021, and my aim with Mariana is to invite a third member to develop the next curatorial program (twelve to eighteen months), and devote most of my energy to working with guest curators and setting up grants to ensure that their activities can continue. So, I see my next and final leg as a way of future-proofing the space for emerging curators that will come after me, so that they are financially secure to take their own risks with curation and cultural production. As well, for me it’s not just changing directorship every few years, but also making sure that the curatorial positions are open and collaborative during our own memberships—I think inviting guest curators does that effectively, because in bringing their own research to our curatorial platform, they also shape how we work and think.

SN: I agree with Noor; when I decided to accept Noor’s invitation to collaborate on window, I did so because I really admired the work she and Mariana had been doing in the city and was excited to develop a relationship with them. I wasn’t planning on leaving Winnipeg so soon either! I decided to stay on the team to fulfill our mandate and see us through the foundational stages of getting solid funding for the space. It was also a nice way to ease out of my time with Winnipeg and stay connected to that community of makers. As we neared the end of our funding cycle, I decided it would be most beneficial to step back and let the team evolve with someone who was embedded in the city. I am still supporting the project in the background over the next few months, but then I am excited to see how things will evolve in a new formation. Good collaboration brings out conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise. It is my favourite way to work and always exciting to see new collaborations and conversations grow.

Lodoe Laura currently resides in Tkaranto/Toronto where she does many different things.

1. https://windowwinnipeg.tumblr.com/post/17781490320.
2. Email with Kegan McFadden, December 2020.
3. Call with Noor Bhangu, December 2020.

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