Where Were You in ’92?

Pamila Matharu has been a practising multi-disciplinary artist and educator in Toronto for over 20 years. In their series of three zines (collectively titled Legacies Unbound: For the Love of Toronto) for the Toronto Biennial of Art, they explore the legacies of arts culture in Toronto, and specifically research how BIPOC artists and youth have been represented in arts spaces and the media starting in the 1990s.

Zine One: Where were you in ‘92? explores the past.

Archives are usually government collections of documents related to “official” histories. They are made accessible to people wanting to gather facts about the past from primary sources, including letters, photographs, reports, notes, memos, etc.

But the reality is, archives often leave out racialized experiences and voices. So where are these stories found? Matharu explores the ideas of embodied archives, found in the sharing of personal stories. Matharu shares their own experiences as a Sikh-Panjabi youth growing up in Toronto. At the pivotal age of 18, Matharu participated in the 1992 Yonge Street Uprising, [1] a response to when a young Black man named Raymond Constantine Lawrence was shot and killed by a police officer. This uprising was organized in protest of police violence. The protest also expressed solidarity with the L.A. Rebellion [2] which emerged from the acquittal of three police officers in the severe beating of a young Black American named Rodney King.

Coming out of this period of social re-awakening (just after the Kanesatake Crisis in 1990) [3], a mentorship program called Fresh Arts was formed in 1992 through provincial funding to amplify anti-racism and social reform for Black and Indigenous youth. Matharu was a mentee of this program starting in 1994 when they opened it up to racialized students more broadly. They explored their own identities through proximities and adjacencies to the city’s Black and Indigenous visual arts culture. Matharu credits their mentors – Winsom Winsom, Itah Sadu, Marie Mumford and Lillian Allen, the founders of the Fresh Arts program – for helping them find their voice as a young artist growing up in a time of under-representation of racialized artists in the city’s arts and culture spaces (including the media).

With contributions from their mentors as well as curators Emilie Chhangur and Phillip Monk, Zine One: Where Were You in ’92? explores what counter-archiving looks like starting with the 1992 Uprising and the formation of the Fresh Arts program.

Note that Zine Two: Paving It Forward features a transcribed and edited discussion between curators, artists, and scholars Andrea Fatona, Deepali Dewan, Emilie Chhangur, Pamila Matharu, and Lisa Myers. This Zine explores the legacy of Fresh Arts and the state of visual culture in Toronto today. Zine Two will be available in printed version during the Biennial at 32 Lisgar Street as well as online. A third zine will propose views on futurities by tracing Matharu’s TBA 2024 installation and related programs taking place during the Biennial. Zine Three will be released in early 2025.