Finding a Landing Place with Anique Jordan
Anique Jordan has always been interested in the archives. When she was younger, she would collect things “that grounded her” like “images, newspapers, and photographs.” As she tells me in our conversation about her work as an artist, she’s “never really stopped doing that.”
When she introduces herself, Jordan first says that she is “an artist from Toronto.”
The city holds an important place in her work, as she explains that it was because of the forgetting and “knowing little” of Black history in Toronto that she wanted to document and explore in her art.
“Toronto has this massive archive that a lot of people don’t have access to or knowledge about. It’s a physical building with just rows and rows, like a warehouse of city history in boxes,” she says.
Jordan’s family immigrated from Trinidad, and she was born in Toronto, growing up in Scarborough. As a child, she was exposed to art through her brother’s interest in art, drawing and early ‘90s hip hop. But it was when Jordan joined the Scarborough Caribbean Youth Dance Ensemble as a young dancer that she began to think about the importance of performance and art.
She describes herself as a conceptual artist who works across mediums, mainly because she does not connect with the term “multidisciplinary” but also because she believes that there is room to grow and move as an artist.
“I’m still on a journey to develop these skills, particularly around materials, sculptures, understanding some of the finite details of performance and really respecting that craft. So I don’t really consider myself multidisciplinary,” she says.
When I inquire more about her sense of being an emerging artist, she explains that she is at a stage where she is still working it all out.
“As somebody who is just beginning to deepen my work as an artist, I think a lot about the work. I have to toil through the pieces and things that I have been questioning. I am trying to find some language to understand,” notes Jordan.
As we discuss her work on a phone call, Jordan reveals that she has a headache. She speaks quietly, but her voice is assured.
We talk about how her Caribbeanness has informed her work, the type of art she wants to create, her experiences as an artist in the United States and the Canadian art scene.
Photo: Stanley Collins
IDARESIT THOMPSON: I was struck by your work in a durational performance like Mas’. Why the performance?
ANIQUE JORDAN: A lot of my understanding of what is possible as a performer comes from performance and Carnival. Parade is central to a carnival. When it comes to the political context, taking up public space, creating things that haven’t existed before and putting them in conversation with things that are real, all of those things are critical parts of Carnival.
IDARESIT: Speaking of Carnival’s presence in your work, your family is from Trinidad. What does “Caribbeanness” mean for your work?
ANIQUE: It’s central to my work. Black Canadians are endlessly hyphenated but not in a way that puts “Canadianess” at the forefront. The Canadian hyphen tends only to come in when we have to interact with the state. And for the most part, we’re not only that; we’re what our parents are. That identity can’t ever be removed from you. I only approach everything I see through that particular framework. I feel like being from the Caribbean gives me a global perspective where I do not think that what I feel here is the only Black experience.
IDARESIT: Stuart Hall describes Caribbeanness (which he applies to a larger diaspora Blackness) as being born out of a place of surviving displacement. Does displacement inform any of your work?
ANIQUE: My work is a response to feeling displaced and trying to find a place. When speaking with my Indigenous friends about land, urban Indigenous youth, and the forceful displacement from their own land and language, I think about African Caribbean people and how far removed we are from a sense of connection to many of the lands we now find ourselves on. So many different arrivals move a type of memory work that has us longing for land, and there are lessons that can come from that type of connection.
For many of us, it’s hard to know what we’re reaching for. Something psychological happens when you don’t know––when you don’t even have the questions or entitlement. In many ways, I am trying to find a sense of belonging in working through ancestral figures and stories. I am trying to find that landing place.
Photo: Stanley Collins
Photo: Stanley Collins
IDARESIT: Where are you heading?
ANIQUE: Some things that I’m thinking about are surreal spaces, Black freedoms and Indigenous sovereignty. I’m still interested in investigating spaces of erasure and questions of what haunts. At the same time, I am also trying to find some breathing room for people to rest their eyes.
IDARESIT: What I find especially interesting about your work is your engagement with hauntology.
ANIQUE: I understand and talk about hauntology as a survival strategy sort of nestled within that haunting space. That enables us to move forward in a particular way across the diaspora. All of it is a type of memory for me. I think I work directly in that realm; my work is situated there. I see the Carnival procession existing within the things that haunt us. All those pieces exist for me in that realm, in that procession between the archive. It’s part of my methodological process. It’s nestled in there.
IDARESIT: How does memory show up?
ANIQUE: I guess it’s a bit of memory and a bit of undoing the amnesia, undoing the forgetting. There is this intentional work of empire, an unfinished colonial project, to make a cohesive Canadian narrative. All that energy is there to make sure that people forget. I see that effort, and I want to undo that.
IDARESIT: Are you creating visibility?
ANIQUE: I attended a lecture by historian Christopher Robinson, where he said that people didn’t give our ancestors the time of day or even the time of their life. So I want to spend that time with them and show them that even 400 years later, they are still on my mind.
IDARESIT: What about the “pull” of your work?
ANIQUE: I did a lot of that work in response to the way people compare Toronto to other cities in the [United] States. People constantly tell Black Canadians that they do not have it as bad as those in the States, so we should “shut up.” So Ban’ yuh belly was a push towards a response––saying, “Actually, remember? How dare you imagine that what we are saying isn’t true.”
Photo: Stanley Collins
IDARESIT: Have you worked as an artist in other parts of Canada?
ANIQUE: I wouldn’t say that I’ve worked as an artist in other parts of Canada; I’ve done other things like teaching. But in the sense that we have been talking about, Toronto can be so loud. I think sometimes people in other cultural arts arenas [in Canada] are like, “Okay, relax, Toronto. We hear you.”
IDARESIT: Mmm. I’m not in Toronto, but I’m always thinking about the (in)visibility of Black art that is happening in other Canadian cities.
ANIQUE: Mhmm. In the same lecture that I attended, Robinson said, “When I go into places, I want to be clear that I’m part of a chorus and I’m not trying to do a solo act, and I will seek out the maestros.”
I thought that was so on point.
I’m joining a conversation that has been going on for a long time. There are masters behind this. I might have a strong sense of what’s going on in Scarborough, but I don’t know about the west end of the city, and I certainly don’t know about Vancouver or Winnipeg.
IDARESIT: How has it been for you during COVID?
ANIQUE: I haven’t been one of those artists that’s just been using this time to be the most prolific ever. I’m trying to catch up on my admin work, and I’m more easily overwhelmed. So, I’m looking forward to seeing humans again.
Alongside Rajni Perera, Akum Maduka and Odudu Umoessien, Anique is currently part of a virtual exhibition organized by Patterns Collective in collaboration with Gallery 1C03; Sanctuaries explores notions of the body within a contemporary frame removed from conventionality.
This interview has been edited and condensed.