Won't you rage with us?
Curated by Venus Underhill

This group show explores and seeks to animate the inherently political nature of rage. Reclaiming the liberatory potential of expressing anger through art when it is continually smothered, incarcerated, institutionalised and suppressed by white supremacy, colonialism and its rage-inducing manifestations. 

What does it mean to harness rage collectively? How can our rage be transformed into a liberatory pursuit? What does expressing rage mean for survivors? 

This exhibit is composed of a collection of collage and mixed media works created by Miles Obilo, Nala Ismacil, Sage and Venus Underhill. Their styles are confrontational, and their works reflect their shared DIY ethos and refusal to maintain a respectability politics that often dominates art space. Won’t you rage with us?

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By Nazanin Zarepour

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and eath, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. – Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger (1981) 

When the empire justifies its dominance, it alleges that it is not governed by rage, it is governed by reason. Western modernity sees itself as the advent of individual and state becoming “master of [the] emotions.” The last year months have made one thing clear – there is no binary between reason and unreason, and there is certainly no politics without rage. Rather, there is only bifurcated rage. The rage of the powerful, as Jane Marcus writes, which is deemed “heroic” and  “godlike” – perpetually pardoned, made invisible, made “rational.” And the rage of the oppressed, deemed “from the devil” – terror, barbarism, “incompatible with Western values.”

This illusory order is always in need of an external force that can crack it open and lay its contradictions bare. It has become a common illusion among the artist class that they can be the ones to expose real political truth. A few months ago on a visit to Toronto’s 401 Richmond, I was delighted by the sight of a (fairly iconic) sign: “Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore the most dangerous” as part of an installation “People, Power & The Park.” Perhaps it’s time for us to have a more frank conversation around being a dangerous artist – can art be dangerous at 401 Richmond?

Notably, the installation was a representation of historically significant moments of protest at Allan Gardens. In other words, it was a park – not the museum (or museum-like appendages) where protest unfolded. Real political truth cannot be located in the museum. The museum is just one machine that is oiled by the same superstructure that frames drone strikes as “the rule of law.” 

Exhibited in April at Hamilton Artists Inc., “Won’t you rage with us?” is a different confrontation with the illusory bifurcation of rage. Curated by Venus Underhill, featuring the works of Miles Obilo, Nala Ismacil, and Sage, the exhibition spouts a blazing DIY ethos of disparate images engaged in a loud argument with the institution. Here, there are no pretenses about the “special role” of the artist. Instead there is the invocation of rage as “smothered, incarcerated, institutionalized and suppressed.”

In “The Political Rationality of the Museum,” sociologist Tony Bennett explores the distinct but complementary development of modern prisons and modern museums. [3] While both institutions are instruments of public instruction and behaviour modification – there is a notable distinction in how this objective is achieved. The modern prison developed as an exclusionary space whereby people are sequestered. The modern museum, on the other hand, developed in resistance to displays of power associated with the ancien regime, and therefore asserted itself as a distinctly public, “democratic” space. 

While the prison makes individuals “objects of administration,” museums make people “subjects of knowledge” – rendering power both visible to people and representing that power “as their own.” In other words, not only does the museum manufacture the “Western world” as a locale of reason, democracy, the rule of law – it makes viewers recognize those ideas as their own, approving of them, legitimizing them, and performing them.

By extension, what the museum does to “dissenting” work is uses it as fodder for its illusions of democracy by packaging it, defanging it, and presenting it as a controlled demolition. Artistic disruption is possible – but only when the artist seeks to directly confront the institution. We’ve seen this manifest most recently through cultural workers organizing in the No Arms in the Arts campaign here in Toronto. The complicity of our city’s institutions were made abundantly clear. But this direct confrontation can also be done aesthetically – albeit with difficulty. 

While “Won’t you rage with us” confronts what the institution is and does – this doesn’t always amount to dissent given the institution’s special knack at capturing even the most explicitly politically motivated work. 

What is notable about “Won’t you rage with us” is its tactical use of media to dislocate rationality at its very ideological roots – more specifically, it is through the use of collage that the exhibition communicates its contention with the institution. Recognizing that Western modernity is precisely the historic moment where rage becomes disappeared and subsumed by “reason,” the aesthetic tactic would be to shred (pun intended) reason itself. And this is a historic tactic – collage appeared as a direct response to Western modernity and its concomitant arrival of “reason.” As Max Ernst framed it, collage is “the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.” 

“Won’t You Rage With Us” couldn’t be a controlled demolition even if it tried – it is tactical. Collage emerged at a time between two world wars when “reason” was exposed as much of a sham as it is now. It did not emerge due to market value. 

These are the moments when artists can lay bare the contradictions. When they take heed of the material conditions, the enemy, and confront it strategically with the right tools. On the outside, the disruptions happen in the fashion of physical disruptions, info-pickets, art strikes. At the aesthetic level, it is the zines, the graffiti, the viscerality, the DIY, the hand-cut stamps, the ripped out construction fencing, the disruption of sanitation and the white cube. 

Rage is everywhere. We know this. It is our duty to refuse its obfuscation, to refuse its disappearance as a tool of ideology, to smash the manipulation of its non-existence. In doing so, it is empire we must recognize as the most rageful. To return again to Lorde, “It is not my anger”... It is not our anger! It is not our anger! It is not our anger “that corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all.”

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Nala Ismacil - Based in Hamilton, artist Nala Ismacil intuitively applies sound, assemblage and pyrography to inspire their self-taught practice. 

Sage - I am Sage Zincone, a trans abstract/contemporary artist. I focus more on collage type work of One/One pieces with no copies or prints being made. I love to use texture and multiple different mediums within my work, drawing out emotions from the page. My work mainly revolves around my emotions and how I feel at the moment, vulnerability is a big part of my work, I use it as way for me to navigate myself and have a better understanding of myself, since I struggle with BPD it can be hard to truly know yourself. My work also includes world issues and draws attention to world topics that I feel aren't being talked about enough or bring out strong emotional feelings within me. I hope my art is able to push people into a space of self reflection and bring out more awareness to more unspoken topics.