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Canada
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Colour
B/W
English/English
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Two characters from "Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)" stare directly at the camera. The person on the left (played by Ravyn Wings) has a blonde bob, medium brown skin, and wears a black jacket with sash made of LED lights, while the person on the right (played by Gloria Swain) is slightly shorter with a short blow-out, light brown skin and round cyberpunk glasses. They appear to be in a tent made of kitenge or other African-style batik with some hanging wires.
Between 11 September and 8 December 2019, Syrus Marcus Ware’s multi-channel video work Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future) was on view at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The video, created with Mishann Lau, features performers Kyisha Williams, Rodney Diverlus, Raven Davis, Janine Carrington, Ravyn Wngz, Gloria Swain, and Jasmyn Fyfe, imagines and stages a dialogue with a future beyond the current epoch of Black social death and insecurity and this time marked by the ever-present capitalist forces of greed and the persistent script of police and state violence. In this piece, written as a companion to the video installation, Ware not only meditates on the precarity of the present but also insists on the necessity for social change through an imagining of the collapse of capitalism and the radical time after with a social restructuring of forms of relations and care. This work draws on the Black speculative, futurist, vision of our ancestor, Octavia Butler, to sketch a radical Black queer imagining of the future—one that queers time, survival, family, and relations to articulate an abolitionist vision as the way forward.
Syrus Marcus Ware. “Syrus Marcus Ware.” Accessed April 18, 2025. https://www.syrusmarcusware.com.
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