refugee reconnaissance
Francisco-Fernando Granados
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refugee reconnaissance by Francisco-Fernando Granados is presented in the salle Jean-Pierre Latour.
refugee reconnaissance surveys a selection of performance scores by Francisco-Fernando Granados spanning 2005-2013. The series of actions trace the artist’s movement from Convention Refugee to Canadian Citizen in the context of his coming-into-being as queer during the vertiginous socio-political changes that transformed the cultural and political status of migrants at the turn of the 21st century. For Granados, this movement from the edge of subalternity into civic agency happened in parallel to his decision to become an artist. Using strategies of duration, repetition, and endurance, the actions explore formal concerns around observation, composition, and mark-making through touching and tracing as a response to experiences of overwhelming desire and unspeakable trauma. Such strategies responded to the increasingly conservative and militarized climate of the early 2000s in ways that sought to challenge the assimilation of migrant bodies into decorative multiculturalisms and neoliberal settler colonialisms. Shaping his intuitions through a range of anti-narrative conceptual approaches, Granados sought to explore what it means to be allowed to settle into a new nation after being uprooted.
Francisco-Fernando Granados was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Through a range of media that extends from performance and installation to publishing and public art, he works with abstraction as a conceptual strategy to create projects that showcase queer perceptions of identity. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with newcomer communities in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions.
Recent projects include duet, a travelling two-person exhibition alongside Canadian modernist painter Jack Bush in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Peterborough and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and co-respond-dance Version II, an artist book published in collaboration with Centre des arts actuels Skol in Montreal. Other exhibition highlights include a performance installation in partnership with Third Space Gallery and the YMCA Newcomer Connections Centre in St. John New Brunswick, public art installations for Mercer Union and Nuit Blanche in Toronto, and participation in international group shows on contemporary queer aesthetics at Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden, the Hessel Museum and Ramapo College in the United States.
Awards and honours include grants from the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and has since taught art and theory in various capacities at OCAD University and University of Toronto Scarborough.
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