Corrections

About

The Central East Correctional Centre located in Lindsay, Ontario, administers restrictions on  materials that can be sent to detainees including corrugated cardboard, lipstick smudges, and stickers. Among the forbidden items, is the sending of “…photographs of any correctional institution/facility” – a restriction Igwe and Pabani chose to subvert and utilize.

Correspondence that violated this policy was returned to the artists, accompanied by a form from theOntario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services and handwritten notes by the mailroom employee tasked with deciding what constitutes an admissible representation of a correctional facility. The services of a graphologist were employed by the artists to develop psychological profiles of this employee based on their handwriting.

Corrections originates from a series of lenticular postcards depicting a series of correctional facilities which Igwe and Pabani sent to the Central East Correctional Centre. The exhibition includes a multi-channel video installation that charts the correspondence of images and text from the year 2000, to the speculative 2025, reflecting adaptations to the function and purpose of incarceration over space and time while questioning the limits of visual representation and hand-written language.

BIOGRAPHIES

Aliya Pabani is an artist and host/producer of Canadaland’s arts and culture podcast, The Imposter. She is a graduate of the Centre for Experimental Media Art at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology in Bangalore. Her recent performances include the livestreamed series Doored, CAPITALIST DUETS by Public Recordings, and Flowchart, at Dancemakers.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist, filmmaker, programmer, and researcher. She lives and works in London, UK. Her video works have shown at the ICA, Nuit Blanche (Toronto) and Guildhall Art Gallery, as well as London Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam. She has upcoming shows at articule, Montreal, and The Showroom, London.