Curtis Talwst Santiago: worlds, worlds, worlds

Curtis Talwst Santiago
worlds, worlds, worlds

September 17, 2026—Janurary 3, 2027
Flanagan Family Gallery

worlds, worlds, worlds explores how stories are held and carried across the vestiges of history and memory. Rooted in a form of world-building where inherited imagination meets critical fabulation, the exhibition celebrates polyphonic identities that negotiate different geographies across time, weaving the material, the fragmentary, and the ever-evolving within storytelling.

Central to the Contemporary Calgary presentation is a focused survey of Santiago's dioramas. Begun in 2008 and collectively known as the Infinity Series, these intimate works move fluidly between personal memories of Caribbean community life—basement dance parties, the quintessential barbershop, figures dreaming in the grass—and broader collective histories such as migration crises and the rise of territorialism in its many forms. These scenes are portrayed as something precious and deliberately sheltered, worlds that can be held in the palm of a hand, inviting careful observation of details often overlooked.

The dioramas are imagined within a scenography of transmission comprising horns, pipes, channels, and circuitry. Formed into sinuous volumes, these structures situate the exhibition across broader infrastructures of digital networks, material circulation, and regimes of surveillance capitalism, unfolding as an operative field in which meaning is generated, disrupted, and redirected. They echo longer histories of movement, extraction, and displacement that continue to underwrite contemporary systems of connection and control. Made from cardboard, the material language extends Santiago's practice of crafting contained worlds from discarded objects: jewellery boxes and found containers used to hold what is deemed precious before themselves being cast aside. That logic of containment and disposal is reactivated here. Cardboard, typically used to transport and protect objects prior to discard, becomes both vessel and structure, foregrounding the uneven politics of what is preserved, circulated, or rendered disposable. This transference of weight reflects the asymmetries of systemic power and selective memory, where what is amplified is not always what is most necessary to hear or remember.

With its visible strata and fragile edges, cardboard retains the imprint of pressure and time, operating simultaneously as surface, structure, and record. This textural sensibility resonates with Santiago's practice as a musician, where attention to rhythm, resonance, and disruption extends into the visual field. Horns and channels recur throughout the exhibition as communicative apparatuses, modulating attention, interruption, and response across lived experience. In this expanded field, perception is not anchored in the visual alone; it is distributed across minor frequencies, subtle registers, and peripheral cues that ask to be heard as much as seen.

This exhibition is especially timely within the North American context, a land shaped by the encounters of peoples from the old and new worlds, where histories, stories, and identities are constantly intersecting and evolving. The condition of partial relay runs throughout, meaning formed through relation, interruption, and circulation. Rather than emerging as fixed or complete, stories unfold through fragments, detours, and acts of exchange, revealing how worlds are continually assembled through encounters with others.

At a moment when cultural gatekeeping, rigid hierarchies of knowledge, and fear of difference continue to structure public discourse, worlds, worlds, worlds affirms curiosity, exchange, and the will to community as practices of repair and collective imagining.

Curated by Kanika Anand.