With Vertigo/Vitiligo, the artist draws our attention to forms of mimicry within dance, through costume, voice, and gestures. The work speaks of physicality, performance, and power relations between generations, genders, and races. Directly referencing the practice of Blackface in minstrel acts, the artist explores the metaphor of the tap-dancer as a particularly important nexus for thinking about the ways in which racial identities are performed and negotiated. The exhibition thus takes the viewer from the materiality of the shoe-shine laborer, to the fluidity of the tap-dancer and into the more complex realities of racial separation and hybridity.

Mansour is interested in alterations of natural skin tones that happen artificially as well as biologically. The materiality of the work presented references the creams and polishes that Minstrel performers historically applied to their face, as well as the lotions her father used to cover up de-pigmented parts of his body that were effected byvitiligo- a condition that Michael Jackson is famously known to have suffered from.

Performance everyday 12 to 3pm

Nahed Mansour est une artiste en performance, vidéo et installation. Son intérêt pour les représentations des relations raciales et de genre l’amène à explorer des archives personnelles et historiques. Elle possède un Baccalauréat en Études sémiotiques et visuelles de l’Université de Toronto et termine présentement une Maîtrise de beaux arts en Open Media à l’Université Concordia. Son œuvre connaît une large diffusion, incluant à Nuit Blanche (Toronto, 2006 et 2009), DSM-V+ (Québec, 2006), 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto, 2006), ainsi que dans le cadre d’une résidence d’artiste à AKA / Red Shift Gallery (Saskatoon, 2008).