Dannielle Tegeder was invited to create a site-specific wall painting, with attached canvas panels, for GUT_BRAIN at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. Curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz and Christine Shaw, GUT_BRAIN is an exhibition series inspired by the primary movements of the digestive system: ingestion, propulsion, mechanical breakdown, chemical digestion, absorption, and elimination.

The first movement, Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess, materializes at the mouth. The mouth tracks the destinies of excess: the origins and symptoms of injurious forms of interdependency that have led to our toxic world. This two-part movement focuses on artists who recognize that modern technologies at the centre of a project of future worldmaking are linked to destructive desires, toxic masculinity, feminicide, dependency on fossil fuels, land dispossession, chemical contamination, remaindered and redundant populations, necropower, and the colonial technosphere to sustain life. The exhibition moves from injury to potential, from predation and separation to symbiosis, from damage to possible futures.

Dannielle Tegeder’s commissioned wall drawing resembles the often invisible material and digital infrastructures that sustain human lives while functioning as a device to relate to the beyond.

More information at blackwoodgallery.ca. Documentation curtesy of the Blackwood Gallery, photography by Toni Hafkenscheid.