EMILIA-AMALIA is an intersectional, intergenerational, feminist experimental working group, initiated in Toronto in 2016. The group takes its name and structure from the practice of affidamento—the relationship in which one woman entrusts herself symbolically to another.

As part of the 150 Hours School, Emilia and Amalia were ‘entrusted’ to one another and through the exchange of authority and writing, their differences became one another’s point of reference for the world.

The group uses informal knowledge sharing and experimental writing to cultivate relationships of mentorship, collaboration and reciprocal indebtedness between generations of artists, writers, thinkers, curators and practitioners.

Our writing and reading groups, film screenings, publications, public talks and workshops are intimate exchanges through which we centre the personal and the political in a desire to activate the undetonated potential of the past. Within our partnerships, we create space and redistribute resources to address feminist histories that have been obscured or overlooked.

EMILIA-AMALIA is an open group that invites all levels of engagement. We are all experts, and no one is an expert.

EMILIA-AMALIA is initiated by Cecilia Berkovic, Yaniya Lee, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, Leila Timmins, Joy Xiang and Shellie Zhang.

EMILIA-AMALIA meets on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of the land.

Current

Cecilia Berkovic

Cecilia Berkovic is a queer artist and graphic designer living in Toronto. She has been involved in local artist-run culture, in various capacities, for over 15 years. She holds an MFA from Bard College in New York.

Yaniya Lee

Yaniya Lee is a writer and editor interested in the ethics of aesthetics. She has written for Vogue, Flash, FADER, Vulture, VICE Motherboard and C Magazine. With curator Denise Ryner, she guest-edited Chroma, the fall 2020 issue of Canadian Art magazine, dedicated entirely to Black arts practices. Lee has participated in residencies at Banff (2017), the Blackwood Gallery (2018), Gallery 44 (2018) and Vtape (2019-2020). Lee was previously on the editorial advisory committees for Fuse and C Magazine, and she now sits on the board of directors of Mercer Union. She teaches Art Criticism at the University of Toronto and works as senior editor-at-large at Canadian Art.

Annie MacDonell

Annie MacDonell is a visual artist working in Toronto. Her practice includes film, photography installation and writing/performance.

Gabrielle Moser

Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and curator. As an independent curator, she has organized exhibitions for Access Gallery, Gallery TPW, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, Vtape and Xpace. Her writing appears in venues including Artforum, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, Prefix Photo and in the book Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Sharon Sliwinski and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Duke University Press, 2017). Her first book is Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State UP, 2019). She holds a PhD from the art history and visual culture program at York University and is an Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Art Education at York University.

Zinnia Naqvi

Zinnia Naqvi is a visual artist based in Toronto and Montreal. Her work uses a combination of photography, video, writings, archival footage and installation. Naqvi’s practice often questions the relationship between authenticity and narrative, while dealing with larger themes of post-colonialism, cultural translation, language and gender.

Leila Timmins

Leila Timmins is a Toronto-based writer and curator. She is currently the Curator and Manager, Exhibitions and Collections at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

Joy Xiang

Joy Xiang is a writer, editor, and arts worker born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work often engages desire, migration, material flows, media nostalgia and futurity, and ways of being together in complication and intimacy. She thinks of the place where poetry might meet criticism might meet the charged liberation of dancing in dark rooms. She has edited for Milkweed erotic zine and re:asian; written for Mercer Union, Ada X, and Hamilton Artists Inc.; and held positions at Blackwood Gallery and Vtape. She was most recently assistant editor at Canadian Art and has participated in residencies with Momus and Triple Canopy.

Shellie Zhang

Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, the diaspora and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.

Past and Founding Members

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