In preparation for the 60th-anniversary celebration of the diplomatic relations between Korea and Canada in 2023, the Korean Cultural Centre called for curators to submit new exhibition proposals. This call intended to open up critical dialogues between Korean and Canadian curators to envision deeper connectivity and sustainable collaboration between the two countries for the next generation.  

Curated by Paola Poletto, Entanglements (Tea, Maybe) is the first of four exhibitions from the 2022 Call for Curators Exhibition series.

Attached below is the accompanying book from the Entanglements (Tea, Maybe) exhibition.  

Entanglements (Tea, Maybe) offers kinships and friendships with propositional imaginings of our transcontinental pasts, presents and futures. Where there are national borders to cross, such as those of Canada and Korea, identities are itching to emerge, escape, to straddle, to return, to move back and over and under and across time, languages, and ways of knowing lands and people. Paul Hong, Jake Kennedy, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, and Paola Poletto offer you tea, maybe, a gathering space to chill, play and sift through the index cards, graze and moo.

The project presents three works including a creative bookwork entitled Mr. Cho Stayed for Tea, by Paul Hong and Jake Kennedy. Inspired by the farm journals of Mary Stewart, a farmer in 1920’s Southwestern Ontario, and a single endpaper entry found within them, written in Korean by Mr. Cho, Hong and Kennedy have researched personal and historical archives to write out the remarkable life of Mr. Cho.

In Proposition 2: Index, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang shares a series of propositions by considering all the maybes and might words found amongst late 1980’s and 1990’s National Geographic magazines as a way to push up against the magazine’s colonial lens.

A final work, Entanglements, brings the artists together to trouble with our understanding of and being in migration and land ownership, and to linger over these metaphorical and physical entanglements. 

Below is the video link from the panel discussion by the Entanglements (Tea, Maybe) artists Paul Hong, Ivetta Sunyoun Kang, Jake Kennedy and Paola Poletto.  This discussion was moderated by Alice Ming Wai Jim of Concordia University.

Click the image below to launch the video.