cat c. haines

TOWARDS LIBERATION

Curatorial Statement by Cat C. Haines

TOWARDS LIBERATION is an SK Arts funded exhibition that brings together the work of established and emerging trans women artists in Saskatchewan to examine how we individually and collectively imagine and work towards liberation. Through performance art, movement, and painting, each woman explores how their unique positionality, body, and experiences can be used as a medium for storytelling and liberation.

Drawing on theory, history, and praxis, the works in this exhibition asks us what it means to be a politicized subject, to be objects of a moral panic, in a conservative prairie province actively seeking to legislate away the rights of queer and trans people. In the face of such violence and erasure, it is vital that we name transmisogyny, the intersectional violence and marginalization leveled against trans women, as a core driver of this moral panic, and discuss the very real material harms of this violence.

Jaye Kovach’s [BRICK] extends Sara Ahmed’s An Affinity of Hammers (2016), which theorizes transmisogyny as a chip, chip, chipping away at trans women. Through this chipping, however, Ahmed suggests we are also given a hammer to chip away at the structural institutions that enact this violence upon our bodies and selves. Kovach asks us to consider what happens when the chip, chip, chipping is not to form us into legible or acceptable subjects, but to obliterate or eradicate us altogether.

In their short film, Nerfed (2018), Kovach describes his disability as potentially being the result of “the cumulative traumas of growing up a very gay little kid in a small town Saskatchewan and transitioning or whatever [frying] my nervous system, causing everyday stimulus to be interpreted as pain.” This pain is brought to the forefront in her performance of [Brick]. As Kovach confronts and attempts to destroy a tower of bricks weighing the same as her disabled, butch, and trans body with a sledge hammer, the realities of this task and its tole on her body are undeniable.

“The bricks... are strong and will persist despite my hammering. I am disabled. My body will tire quickly. It will hurt.” - Jaye Kovach

This task of obliteration speaks to the abjection of transmisogyny. The abject is that which we reject from our bodies and our society, that which is pushed out because it represents a threat to our lives or livelihood. Trans women are a threat, a silent apocalypse capable of dismantling oppressive structures with our mere bodies and existence, but as Kovach notes, often with a very significant material cost to trans women.

In jade kaleia’s gentle revolution, we see a response to this abjection with a movement, a revolution, towards the sublime. This sublimation occurs at the blurry boundary between kaleia’s body and the land; there is a slippage here, between her body and the land; one standing in for the other, standing in for the other. Her body stands in for the land, extends the land, is the land, is occupied, is exploited, is resisting, is liberating, is healing. 

kaleia states that “dreams serve as a reminder that possibility is a practice,” and it is through this practice of healing movement with the land that kaleia ultimately reaches towards and finds liberation in her body. It is through the movements of demanding a ceasefire that kaleia’s heart “pulses with a deeper rhythm,” and her hips “unfurl like blossoming flowers.” These shifts in her body are shifts in the material world, and are where the future takes shape.

“Groundedness asks for gentleness” - jade kaleia

In  my series of aquarelle paintings presented in this exhibit, I explore the intersection of gentleness with my activist practice, a practice that has, in the past, been described as ‘loud and angry.’ The moments captured in this series are undeniably intense: the first (and an unpermitted) trans pride in Saskatchewan where we demanded better access to healthcare, salaciously kissing my butch during the parade as hundreds looked on and took photos, and leading chants at a protest against Bill 137, the “Parental Bill of Rights,” where we estimate over 1,000 people showed up to support Two Spirit and trans youth. In these moments, my intensity is driven by righteous queer and trans rage, but also by a deep unabiding love for humanity, for the world, and for a better future. Through rendering these images in watercolour I hope to soften them, to make these moments beautiful and approachable, so that the audience might think they too want to take up the work.

In Ceasefire Now, Unfinished Work (2024), a painting of myself getting arrested at an action demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and which I developed through an SK Arts grant I was awarded in late 2023, I leave the painting un-done as a material representation of the shift in my work as an artist|activist|academic towards that of calling for an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Palestine, a meaningful two-way arms embargo with Israel, and a Free Palestine. 

Ultimately, the work of trans liberation (and art) is that of liberation from colonial and capitalist states who seek to steal and exploit a land and population base towards the benefit of the elite. Nina Simone states that “an artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times,” and in my final report to SK Arts for the grant that funded Ceasefire Now, Unfinished Work, I state:

May you see the death of the zionist state in your lifetime.