Jul 17 2025
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:04:00.
Conference Presentation, “Guarding the Past: Memory Securitization and Museum Collections,” Museums and Memory Working Group, Memory Studies Association, University of Southern California Los Angeles, January 24 - 25, 2025.
Dec 19 2024
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:20:00.
Aug 15 2024
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:13:00.
Conference Attendance, “Violence and Repair” at the 2024 Mnemonic Summer School, University of California Los Angeles, July 9 - 11, 2024.
Conference Attendance, “Westsplaining in Art History” at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Tallinn, June 28, 2024.
Conference Attendance, “Cultural Heterologies and Democracy: Transitions and Transformations in Post-Socialist Cultures in the 1980s and 1990s” at the Estonian Academy of Art, Tallinn, June 26 - 27, 2024.
Conference Attendance, “Bridge-Building through Art Exhibitions: the Cold War Divide, the Fall of the Wall, and Beyond” at Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden, March 21 - 22, 2024.
Jan 25 2024
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:09:00.
Event Curator, “Another Year, Wishes” featuring Evaldas Jansas, at Joys, Toronto, on view January 1, 2024.
Still from Evaldas Jansas’ "Linkejimai/Wishes" (1998) Digital Video. 23:01 duration.
One of the earliest Lithuanian video works was Evaldas Jansas’ “Linkejimai/Wishes,” which was filmed in 1998, on the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. In ‘Linkejimai’ Jansas asks passersby in various locales, on the street; in bars; and at the contemporary art centre, what they wish for themselves and for others. Jansas invites strangers to articulate their values, fantasies, anxieties and epistemologies.
Since 2018, I’ve organized annual screenings of this work on New Years Eve and New Years Day in partnership with various contemporary art institutions.
Exhibition Curator, “An Infinite Loop in the Virtual Plaza,” featuring Sophia Oppel, at Crutch Contemporary, Toronto, on view October 05—27, 2019.
Installation view.
Oppel’s exhibition mapped the parallels between public architecture and ‘user-friendly’ digital interfaces. Centered around an essayistic video work that investigates these ‘invisible’ infrastructures and the logic that underpins their aesthetics, this body of work attempts to unpack the implications of tools that extract information through psychological conditioning.
This exhibition won the Nuit Blanche Independent Project Prize from the City of Toronto, 2019.
Still from “placelessness in parallel" (2019) Digital Video. 10:00 duration.
Installation view.
Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt. Their job is to take the long view, the cold and stony view, of triumphs and catastrophes in the history of life. They study teeth, tree trunks, leaves, pollen, and other biological relics, and from it they attempt to discern the lost secrets of time, the big patterns of stasis and change, the trends of innovation and adaptation and refinement and decline that have blown and evaporated, like sea winds among ancient creatures in ancient ecosystems. Although life is their subject, death and burial supply all their data. This gives to paleontologists a certain distance, a perspective beyond the reach of anxiety over outcomes of the struggles they chronicle. If “hope is the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson said, then it's good to remember that feathers don't generally fossilize well.
“Planet of Weeds” was comprised almost entirely of found objects/refuse reappropriated by the artists featured in this exhibition.
Garrett Lockhart, Suzanna Zak, “Lock 'n Key” 2019, Steel fence, found handwritten directions, horseshoe, found keys, charms, wire, plastic, found U-lock, worry stone, 43.5 x 36 x 44.5 in.
Garrett Lockhart, “WASTELAND” (2019) lumber crayon rubbing on found paper, salvaged nails, 18 × 24 in.
Nikki Woolsey, “March-April,” (2019) wood, found glass, found metal, nails, found rope.
Suzanna Zak, “Moss Soak” (2019) weathered c-print, stone, wildflowers, resin, steel.
Installation view.
Event Curator, “2020” featuring Anton Vidokle, Zeesy Powers, Angus Tarnawsky, at Crutch Contemporary, Toronto, July 7, 2019.
Still from Anton Vidokle’s “Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism” (2014-2017) HD video, color, sound. 96:00 duration. Russian with English subtitles.
Today the philosophy known as Cosmism has been largely forgotten. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, Russian Orthodox traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers until they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In this three-part film project, artist Anton Vidokle probes Cosmism’s influence on the twentieth century and suggests its relevance to the present day.
In Zeesy Powers’ virtual reality work “This Could Be You” the viewer inhabited the body of an algorithmically-generated 90-year-old woman, naked and battered by the refuse of the information worker. VR is positioned as a technology of infinity: you can be anyone, anywhere, doing anything; and yet, as Zeesy reminds users, its practices are also those of confinement: where you find yourself trapped in a space limited by sensors, the length of a cable, and the limits of someone else’s imagination.
A performance by Angus Tarnawsky explored sound through an assembled orchestra of radio frequencies.
Exhibition Curator, “The Upper Side of the Sky” featuring Jawa El Khash, Crutch Contemporary Art Centre, Toronto, on view April 12—May 11, 2019.
Stills from “The Upper Side of the Sky” (2019) VR, 10:00 duration.
“The Upper Side of the Sky” featured a virtual reality work that resurrected Syrian agriculture and architecture. The digital ecosystem consisted of a greenhouse, courtyard, chrysalis chamber, butterflies and ancient monuments native to the Syrian desert, Palmyra. The monuments rendered in VR have been destroyed, and the species rendered in VR have recently gone endangered or extinct as the collateral damage of the Syrian Civil War. The digitization of these lost architectural sites and plant life allows them to live on unharmed in an XYZ dimension.
Exhibition Curator, “First A Radical, and Second, an Optimist” featuring Grayson Alabiso-Cahill and Tony Cokes, at Crutch Contemporary, Toronto, on view February 08—March 24, 2019.
Installation view.
Using the gallery as an ad-hoc pedagogical site, this project took the form of a transient installation, a series of workshops, and several multiples. Grayson Alabiso-Cahill was interested in radical mythologies, in the unruly birthplaces of popular uprisings, and in the rose-tinted and often troubling nostalgia of young and masculine leftism. The Paris Commune, for Cahill, marked the beginning of a new kind of political action: one that is photographed, performed, propagandistic, celebratory and popular. The transiency of this installation tried to nod to the ways in which any reading of a history is revisionist.
In “Black Celebration,” Tony Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create a counter-reading of rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital; as an attempt to de-fetishize commodity through theft. Tony Cokes’ practice questions how our modes of political and civic articulation are guided and shaped by media image circulation, and how that in turn defines the horizon of emancipatory struggles.
Still from Tony Cokes’ “Black Celebration” (1988) Digital video. 17:11 duration.
Collaged by Kenley Blackwood
In Words and Parades Workshop
Exhibition Curator, “Iron Smirk: Action Art 1976-81” featuring Lumír Hladík, at Bunker 2 Contemporary, Toronto, on view Mar 15—Apr 01, 2018.
Still from "Entering nowhere," Česká Lípa, Czech Republic, 1980.
‘I commenced my piece by walking, blindfolded, down a winding road in the middle of a forest at midnight. I walked alone. Being able to differentiate between the asphalt or grass under my feet helped me to stay within the perimeter of the road. I walked for a long time. When I had completely lost all sense of distance and time, I stopped and, using my finger, I drew an imaginary line across the road. This virtual ”border” divided my personal universe into two universes; where I have been and where I have not. I returned. The next night, around the same time, I undertook the same trip, blindfolded, again. My goal was not to cross the preset line from the previous day. I tried to guess where the exact spot that I had drawn the line was and stopped there, turned around and returned. The most important objective was to drive the Not-knowing about my whereabouts to highest possible intensity; to exist, for a while, nowhere.’
When acts of unsanctioned creativity are categorized as treason against the state, every movement, every moment, can become a form of rebellion. Within communist Czechoslovakia artist Lumír Hladík was an integral catalyst for ‘action art,’ a term used to denote public and private performance work. These happenings ranged from the critical to the absurd, but all represented a type of artistic freedom that was suppressed under censorship. “Iron Smirk” was a modest but comprehensive retrospective of Hladik’s work from 1976 to 1981.
Exhibition Curator, “The Bomb Party, or What Goes Up” featuring Grayson Alabiso-Cahill, at Bunker 2 Contemporary, Toronto, on view January 11—February 9, 2018.
Installation view.
This body of work by Grayson Alabiso-Cahill explored the ways in which war is depicted, disseminated, and aestheticized. The exhibition was accompanied by the performace ‘In Honours of a Great Nation’.
Press:
Review of my work by the Ryersonian, “The fine line between spectacle and violence” January 24, 2018.
Exhibition Curator, “long pause” featuring Robert Anthony O’Halloran, at Bunker 2 Contemporary, Toronto, on view September 17—October 8, 2017.
Installation view.
Robert Anthony O’Halloran creates site-specific installations that explore humour, base materiality, and our collective need for pleasure in light of calamity. “long pause” featured a sound performance by Scott Hardware.
Press:
Review of my work by Canadian Art, September 21, 2017.
Exhibition Curator, “Conservatory” featuring Ronan Stewart, Bunker 2 Contemporary, on view May 11 —June 4, 2017.
Installation view.
Ronan Stewart’s practice addresses ecological deterioration through poetry, painting, audio, and sculpture in the expanded field.
Press:
Review of my work by cmagazine, “A New Generation,” Issue 135, 2017.
Review of my work by the Toronto Star, “Have art, will travel” May 14th, 2017.
Event Curator, “Muscle Panic: Dutch Masters House” featuring Hazel Meyer, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, March 2, 2017.
Installation view.
Hazel Meyer’s mutable body of work, ‘Muscle Panic’, considers the performance of the athletic. Evoking the imagery of momentous sports history, the bodily gestures and actions of a drill or warmup and the aesthetics of the gymnasium, Meyer instigates an arena of sweat and desire. Simultaneously an installation and a performance, Muscle Panic transforms the banal and austere white cube into a hot physically charged site for emotional and physical exchange.
Press:
Review of my work by esse magazine, "No Rest for the Wicked," Issue 103, Fall 2021.
v-ivanova@mailbox.org
Education: Cultural Heritage, Museum and Memory Studies
York University
Class of 2024
Master of Fine Arts (EQF level 7)
Art Criticism and Curatorial Practice
Ontario Art and Design University
Class of 2018
Bachelor of Science, with honours (EQF level 6)
Philosophy major, Architecture minor
Portland State University
Class of 2016
Visiting researcher
Wende Museum of the Cold War
08/2024 – 02/2025
Visiting researcher
McGill University
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures; Russian and Slavic Studies
09/2022 – 05/2023
Sessional faculty
York University
Faculty of Education
09/2018 – 05/2023
Sessional faculty
Ontario Art and Design University
Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences
09/2016 – 05/2018
Curatorial experience:
Curatorial Fellowship
Art Gallery of Ontario
09/20 16 - 05/2018
Associate Director
Bunker 2 Contemporary
11/2014 - 06/2018
Curatorial assistant
Gallery TPW
(Internship)
05/2017 - 10/2017
Experience managing, writing, or editing content:
Broadcast Journalist
Radio Vilnius
09/2022 – Current
Managing Editor
Ontario Art and Design University
Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences
09/2019 – 05/2020
Assistant Editor
MOMUS
(Internship)
05/2017 – 10/2017
Administrative experience:
Programming Coordinator
YYZ Artists’ Outlet/YYZ Books
10/2018 – 05/2022
Gallery Assistant
NATIONALE
10/2012 – 07/2014
Executive Administrative Assistant
Portland State University
Graduate School of Social Work
09/2012 – 05/2014
Gallery Assistant
Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts (Internship)
06/2011 – 05/2013
Last Updated 25.07.23