We're thrilled to feature Artists' Tarot and the Archive and Portraits as Portals — two exhibitions curated by DisplayCult that examine the archive through alternative ways of knowing, particularly through intuition.

Location: Archives of Ontario's Reading Room at 134 Ian Macdonald Blvd., Toronto, ON M7A 2C5
Dates: October 28, 2024 to March 31, 2025
Visiting hours: Monday-Friday, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm

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Suzanne Treister, Hexen 2.0 Tarot, selection of cards, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and DisplayCult.

Artists' Tarot and the Archive examines the intriguing connections between two seemingly unrelated phenomena: the Tarot and the archive. Tarot decks can be traced back to the 14th century, but emerged as a divinatory technique with the publication of the Etteilla deck by occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette in Paris in 1788. That date and place, interestingly, coincide with the beginning of the modern notion of the archive, which developed out of the French Revolution in 1790 when the new government consolidated records to systematize social planning for an emerging state bureaucracy. As disparate as the Tarot and archive may seem — the former assembles cards to prompt intuition, while the latter organizes documents for preservation — both operate as epistemological resources. In times of precarity, interest in the Tarot and public archives heightens as people seek to understand their lives from a broader perspective. Just as the Tarot serves as a repository of symbolic meanings and esoteric wisdom, the archive maintains the materials for analyzing events and constructing histories. The Tarot and the archive thus align in their capacity to illuminate the past, comprehend the present and plan for the future.

This exhibition includes 15 Canadian and international artists, with works from the 1990s to today: Kim Abeles, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Nin Brudermann, Jo Cosme, Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan, Ron Ewenin-Wapemoose, Brenda Fajardo, Lee Henderson, Mimi Khúc, Dogon Krigga, Jack Niven, Tomás Saraceno, Suzanne Treister and John Walter. A Tarot deck typically features 78 cards with iconography of the royal court and personages, but contemporary artists diverge from convention by creating their own imagery. The artists employ painting, drawing, photography, collage, text and digital tools, and sometimes combine cards with items such as guidebooks, audio recordings and occult paraphernalia. Some of the decks are made in limited art editions, while others are published in print runs designed for mass distribution.

These artists’ Tarot decks connect with the archive in several ways: by drawing images and materials from archives to create a Tarot deck; by using Tarot as a platform to create a new archive; by highlighting Tarot-based skills and perceptions that are also exercised by archival researchers; and even by mobilizing the archive itself as an oracular device. In each case, the Tarot functions as more than just a method of divination. These artists' projects engage with the practices of decolonization, activism, education, media critique, and community building to address myriad pressing issues affecting contemporary life. Artists' Tarot and the Archive reveals how artists' Tarot decks strategically intertwine with the archive as a generative place for insight and research into history, memory, storytelling and knowledge production.

Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read an Unknown Artist

What can be known about artists whose names have been lost to history? DisplayCult has invited professional mediums to undertake psychic readings of often-overlooked portraits by "unknown artists" in public art collections since 2018. No details about the works were provided to the readers in advance. During the sessions, mediums were asked to look through the eyes of the portrait's subject to receive impressions about the unknown artist. The portrait thus becomes a portal through which the psychic channels resonant details about the artist's life, manner of working, personal relationships and position within the social milieu. Much in the same way that psychic mediums work with police departments to locate missing people, this project tests the use of paranormal perception as a method for art-historical investigation.

The unattributed portrait in this exhibition is from the Government of Ontario Art Collection, managed by the Archives of Ontario. The installation configures the painting in relation to a cycle of videotaped readings by mediums that reconstitute details about the unknown artist's life. While some readings offer potentially verifiable facts, more often they operate on an affective level: transmitting energies and feelings about the artist's emotional states and motivations, the mood of the era, and the atmosphere of the setting's context. The different readings overlap and differ in intriguing ways, even at times aligning with what is suggested by current art-historical scholarship.

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Jennifer Fisher & Jim Drobnick, Readings for an Unknown Artist through “Portrait [seated lady in a black dress; Margaret Nelson or Catherine Edithe (?) Brown], ” 2024, unattributed portrait (c. 1900), oil on canvas, 86 x 71 cm / 34 1/2" x 28 1/4", Government of Ontario Art Collection, AC637417, high-res colour video, 32:15 minute cycle of 5 readings. Psychic medium depicted: Robin Cleland. Photo: DisplayCult.

The videotaped sessions also present compelling performances of psychic mediumship. They show intuition as an embodied practice as the readers receive and articulate the subtle impressions they discern through the paintings. Each reading reveals a fascinating flow of mediumistic bearing, gestures and pauses as the psychics see, hear, feel and even smell aspects of the artists' lives.

The practices of channeling documented in this project reflect Spiritualism's longstanding influence on the conventions of art viewing. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was Spiritualists working in museum education who initiated the exercise of attuning to original works of art as a secular meditation. Communing with artworks through this kind of mediumistic viewing, where the presence of artworks energetically implicates the beholder, continues in museums today and remains integral to aesthetic experience.

Jim Drobnick (OCAD University) and Jennifer Fisher (York University) form the curatorial collaborative DisplayCult, a framework for creatively merging disciplines, media and audiences to propose prototypes for display and aesthetic engagement. Curatorial projects include Archives by Artists (Archives of Ontario), Portraits as Portals (Art Windsor-Essex and Agnes Etherington Art Centre), NIGHTSENSE (Nuit Blanche, Toronto), MetroSonics (National Gallery of Canada), Aural Cultures (Walter Phillips Gallery), Odor Limits (Esther M. Klein Art Gallery) and Vital Signs (Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery), among other exhibitions (see www.displaycult.com). They founded and edit the Journal of Curatorial Studies.

Special thanks to all of the artists whose inspiring work features in the Artists' Tarot and the Archive exhibition and to Kristy Apodaca of Tribal Vibes Wild Fire Healing Centre and Amanda Benesh at Heritage Community Association, Regina; Dawn Atienza and Eya Beldia at Tin-aw Art Gallery, Manila; Jarad Buckwold and the City of Winnipeg Archives; Krista Hamlin and Kerry Logan at Museum London; Virginia Lupo at Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; Christina Pethick at neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Richard Ravenhawke; and Juliana Zalucky at Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto.

Thanks also to Heather Pigat, whose guidance and support facilitated the loan of the portrait in the Portraits as Portals installation for the video shoot at the Joan Goldfarb Study Centre at York University. Additional thanks to DisplayCult's production team for the Portraits as Portals project: Renée Lear for her brilliant videography, video editing and ongoing commitment to the project, and Hailey Kobrin for her impeccable production assistance. We profoundly appreciate the openness of the psychic mediums identified through this research for contributing their extraordinary gifts. Finally, we thank the Spirit artist who came through during the readings for their gracious collaboration. The research and production of the video for the Portraits as Portals exhibition was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the School of Art, Media, Performance and Design at York University, and the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University.