Snack Witch Joni Cheung 張文懿 with co-conspirators maya rae oppenheimer, Geneviève Wallen, Amanda Lickers, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, Gendai: Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng.
💋xoxo: gossiping as + on wayfinding in the arts 💋
Conference-Brunch on Saturday, November 1st.
Doors open at 10:30.Event starts at 11 AM and will end around 1 PM.
Open to all, limited seats, tickets available on Eventbrite.
RSVP by October 29th 11:59 pm EST to secure a seat & brunch snacks/beverages.
Snack Witch Joni Cheung 張文懿 is delighted to invite you to a gathering with Amanda Lickers, Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng (Gendai), maya rae oppenheimer, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, and Geneviève Wallen for 💋xoxo: gossiping as + on wayfinding in the arts 💋.
Organized in conjunction with the performance, H ART Department, come for a brunching good time where we’ll learn about the ways these fellow artists/curators/educators/arts workers use whisper networks to navigate the spicy art world we continue to work in. 🌶️
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Accessibility Needs/Questions + Can't Make it?
Do you have any accessibility requirements? Please email outreach@articule.org and we will do our best to accommodate you if you let us know in advance. This could cover dietary restrictions, timing, translation/ASL…
There are limited spots total to participate in this event, if you sign up and realize later that you can't make it, please be mindful and cancel or email outreach@articule.org to give your spot up + meal to someone else who may want to participate!
Snack Witch Joni Cheung 張文懿
🔮 Snack Witch Joni Cheung 🍡 is a grateful, uninvited guest born—and knows she wants to die—on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh peoples. They are a Certified Sculpture Witch with an MFA from Concordia University (2023). She holds a BFA with Distinction in Visual Art (2018) from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. As a wicked #magicalgirl ✨ who eats art and makes snacks, she has exhibited, off- and online, across Turtle Island and beyond. Currently, they are based on the stolen lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka and Mi’kmaq peoples, working under precarious conditions as a sessional professor at Concordia University and NSCAD University.
They have received support from various funding bodies, including the British Columbia Arts Council; Canada Council for the Arts; and Concordia University.
Aside from art-making, Joni likes wandering down grocery store aisles and drinking bubble tea. 🧋
Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and arts worker originally from Quebec City and now based in Saint-Jean-Baptiste (QC), a small village on the traditional territory of the Waban-Aki Nation. She earned a BFA in Print Media from Concordia University in 2018 and an MFA in Fine and Media Arts from NSCAD University in 2020. She is interested in the unpaid and invisible labour that exists in the periphery of every artistic practice and addresses these bureaucratic tasks with humour as a way to legitimate art. Her performances invite to reflect on the value of the artist’s work, perceptions of productivity and where art and life meet, through the intersections of gender and class dynamics.
Her work has been featured in artist-run centres and galleries across Canada, including La Maison des artistes visuels francophones (Winnipeg, MB), the Atlantic Arts Symposium (Saint John, NB) and, more recently, Latitude 53 (Edmonton, AB). She has participated in research-creation residencies at Atelier d’estampe Imago (Moncton, NB), Céline Bureau and L’Imprimerie centre d’artistes (Montréal, QC). She also works collaboratively on a number of participatory performance projects. Her practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, LOJIQ and Culture Montérégie.
Geneviève Wallen is an award-winning independent curator. Her writing, research, workshop facilitation, and mentoring practices are rooted in the territories of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal) and Tkaronto (Toronto). Intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, and alternatives to neo-liberal definitions of care inform her curatorial practice, administrative ethics and pedagogy. Her curatorial explorations include the practice of gift-giving, carving spaces for unfinished thoughts, and musings on longevity.
Wallen also produces and hosts the podcast The Conversations that Carry Us/ Ces conversations qui nous soutiennent. She is part of the YTB Gallery collective, a member of the advisory board for the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, and serves on the board of Vie des arts.
Amanda Lickers is a designer, pedagogue, multi-media artist and consultant whose work reflects the interconnected relationship of land-body sovereignty. She is the 2023-2025 Indigenous Land Restitution Research-Creation Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture whose research-creation short film and exhibition titled everlasting are on view in the Shaughnessy House until August 2026. An Indigenous co-design consultant, Amanda has worked with museologists, curators, architects, archaeologists and designers to implement Indigenous design principles and decolonize contemporary approaches to the built environment. Amanda completed her first visual arts residency in the fall of 2024 at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity's inaugural Hide Tanning & Parfleche Residency. Her work in film has been screened across Haudenosaunee territory from Montreal, QC to Toronto and Buffalo, NY, and internationally in Ōtāku, New Zealand and London, England. As a pedagogical consultant she has worked across various levels of the education sector and is currently teaching at Dawson College while completing her Master of Arts in Individualised Studies at Concordia University.
maya rae oppenheimer (she/her) is the founder and co-director of OK Stamp Press and Ddense Sun Press. She’s also a daughter, sister, aunt of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who receives joy and financial remuneration as an artist/writer/researcher/educator/bookmaker. She was born in Treaty 1 territory and spent over a decade living in London (UK). maya is now an uninvited guest on Kanien’kehá:ka territory where she preoccupies herself with paper- and book-making as social practice. Experimental writing, radical pedagogy, open-access publishing, mutual aid, DIY tactics and methods make up her tool-kit. maya joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in September 2017 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and is now based in the Department of Studio Arts. She holds a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of London and an MA from the Royal College of Art. Artist website under perpetual construction.
Gendai
Gendai (Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng) is an art collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto dedicated to racialized artists as the next generation of cultural leaders, radical thinkers, and visionaries.
Marsya Maharani (she/her) is an Indonesian independent curator and researcher working exclusively in collaboration with others, including as part of the collectives Younger than Beyonce (YTB), Gendai, and Collective Collective. Informed by her position as an immigrant and settler, her projects explore experimentation in learning, working, and playing together to nourish diverse ways of thinking, specifically in relation to issues of equity. She has written for Xpace Cultural Centre, CMagazine (with Petrina Ng), and the anthology The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, edited by Gregory Blair & Noa Bronstein (with Geneviève Wallen).
Petrina Ng (she/her) is an artist, organizer, and racialized settler based in Toronto. Petrina’s collaborative work as Gendai responds to racialized labour conditions of arts work. Their research and practice of collective values experiments with pathways towards a more equitable arts sector. Petrina is also co-founder of Durable Good, a small publishing studio that supports artists, writers, and thinkers who work within feminist, equitable, and engaged frameworks; and Waard Ward, a collective that works with floristry and gardening to build stronger newcomer and refugee communities. Waard Ward has recently contributed to large-scale, collaborative projects presented by Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, ArtworxTO: City of Toronto’s Year of Public Art, and Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough.
Calendar of Events
This event is a collaboration between artist Snack Witch Joni Cheung 張文懿 and co-conspirators Amanda Lickers, Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng (Gendai), maya rae oppenheimer, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, and Geneviève Wallen in the context of the H Art Department performance at the artist-run centre articule.
Performance H Art Department
— October 29th to Oct. 31st, 2025. Open from 12 to 6 PM.
Gendai CBA: Collective Bargaining Agency / Workshop
— Thursday October 30th, 2025. Doors open at 5 PM. Catch the tail end of H ART Department performance from 5 to 5:30 PM!! CBA workshop from 5:30 - 7:30 PM. Free and open to all.
💋xoxo: gossiping as + on wayfinding in the arts 💋
— Conference-brunch on Saturday, November 1st. Doors open at 10:30, Event starts at 11 AM.
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming space for all.
Considering ongoing COVID-19 and flu transmissions, please note that mask wearing is strongly recommended during events.