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Critical Distance Centre For Curators (CDCC)

Website

180 Shaw Street, #302, Toronto, ON, Canada

Email: emily@criticaldistance.ca

Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) is a not-for-profit gallery, publisher, platform, and partner supporting curatorial community, discourse, and production across disciplines and beyond borders of all kinds. As an independent curator-led initiative, our mission springs from the interests, motivations and methodologies of contemporary curatorial practice, foregrounding critical inquiry, collaboration, and experimentation in making new connections between artists, art forms, ideas, images, objects, environments, and audiences. Providing a venue and context for curators and artists in all stages of their professional development, our exhibition program is developed with an eye toward stimulating curiosity, conversation, and critical thinking on contemporary culture and the curation/creation of exhibitions themselves through the lenses of collecting, organizing, displaying, and viewing or experiencing. Through our publishing program, each exhibition is fully documented in a modest yet beautifully designed catalogue with original curatorial essay—a welcome benefit and service to the artists and curators whose work is published, as well as to audiences who receive reader-friendly context on the work and exhibition. Through an inclusive and varied program of events including talks, screenings, workshops, performances and more, we aim to enrich the exhibition experience and encourage active audience participation in our projects and programming. With a focus on critically-engaged, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary practices, underrepresented artists and art forms, and community outreach and education in art and exhibition-making, CDCC is an open platform for diverse curatorial perspectives, and a forum for the exchange of ideas on curating and exhibition-making as ways to engage and inform audiences from as many publics as possible. As an organization, we ensure our mandate stays relevant by prioritizing relationship-building with other organizations and communities as core to our programs. Working in sustained collaboration with other organizations, collectives, and artists across the arts ecology allows us to remain responsive to our communities more broadly. We also practice the same collaborative energy within the structure of our tight-knit team, enacting consensus-based models for discussion and decision-making as a group.