Artist-in-Residence

Noni Kaur

CSACH is proud to have had Noni Kaur as our Winter 2024 artist-in-residence.

Sniff, 2024

Noni's Art Installation featured in Maanjiwe Nendamowinan building

Discover more of Sniff as you listen to Noni's self-guided audio tour as you view images in the gallery below of her installation, that was featured on the second floor of the Maanijwe Nendamowinan building from in Winter 2024.

Artist Statement

My practice explores my cultural history as an intersectional woman of color, through rituals and materials that are adapted or transformed in different environments according to the posthuman experience, through decay, regeneration and cellular systems building systems. With great rigour and robust fervour, I explore site-specific installations that traces the agency of cellular, plasmic, and parasitic forces in both human and non-human worlds. Through spatial interventions, I explore cycles of life and death, ephemerality, and nature. 

My work is an exploration in materiality, rituals, assimilation, and bridging gaps of the human and post-human environments. while tracing the agency of cellular, plasma and parasitic forces in both human and non-human worlds. I explore cycles of life and death, ephemerality, nature through medium explorations. These result in vibrant, colorful, fleshy, and fluid natural depictions of cellular play in the unseen environment. The impactful, zestful painted cellular maps are based on interior biosystems that expand outward, displaced and swallowing up patrons in a microbial world that often goes unnoticed in daily human life. It is a platform for critical engagement, creative interpretation in experimental, progressive, and impactful artwork. My works are conversations that are about lived experiences.

Biography

Noni Kaur is an international award-winning multidisciplinary artist, and educator. Kaur’s works are an embodiment of her response to intersectional identity across cultures and communities. Her immersive, reactive, multi-sensory installations bridge gaps between gender, culture, the body, and the non-human world. Through her expansive, topographical landscapes of desiccated coconut installations Kaur explores intersectionality through her heritage that result in her bold cellular mapping works stemming from being a Singaporean woman of Punjabi descent in Canada. 

Kaur’s work has been featured in public galleries and international venues including: the Havana Biennale, Cuba; the Asian Art Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Fukuoka Triennale, Asian Art Museum, Japan; White Columns, New York; the Henie Onstad Kunstenter, Oslo, Norway, Mississauga Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Burlington, Station Gallery, Whitby, Royal Ontario Museum, amongst others. Kaur is a professor and lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Image courtesy of the artist, Noni Kaur. Photographed by Nicholas Iwanyshyn

Noni created a multi level work of physical art that used one's visual and olfactory senses, called Sniff. She laboriously hand dyed desiccated coconut to make vibrant figures on the ground.  The windows in the hallway showcased abstract images of microbial bacteria that we all depend on to sustain life. The shadows cast by the vinyl depicting microbial bacteria interacted with the ground art in unexpected ways.

Take in the full gallery while listening to Noni's audio tour to get the most out of the experience!