Veronica Mockler
I Won’t Do It Alone

From November 14, 2024 to January 18, 2025
Opening on November 14 at 6 pm
— Facebook event

Veronica Mockler’s work uses participatory dialogue to investigate processes of shared authority. Her art practice seeks to redefine who and how we can participate in the institutions of art, citizenship, and knowledge.

From 2022-2024, Mockler led À l’image — Takeover, an outreach project for Dazibao, in partnership with Black community organizations of Little Burgundy neighborhood in Montréal, which aimed to give a cohort of young women a platform to collectively respond to the gallery’s exhibitions through the artistic medium of their choice. As an artist and leader, her role in this project involved establishing a framework, guiding discussions, and coordinating participants to realize their projects. Following À l’image — Takeover, Dazibao invited Mockler to create a follow-up response that would address her experience and how socially engaged practices steer the development of the artists who undertake them. 

For I Won’t Do It Alone, Mockler implemented a durational structure wherein every hour from 9 to 5, for 5 days, she speaks to the camera for two and a half minutes in what she calls “briefings”. Unscripted and unedited, each briefing was then sent to different participants from past projects, inviting them to respond in a video of their own. The accumulated videos meander through personal, artistic, and social issues including precarity, privilege, authenticity, worth, ethics, form, and many more.

Over the course of the diligently executed task, the moniker “briefing” is switched out for “confession,” “testimony,” “address,” and “experiment.” The open-endedness of dialogue as a form, when applied to the artist and her participants in novel solitude, collapses into a kind of void as they stumble into a labyrinth of ideas — or perhaps more accurately, a labyrinth of thinking. They try to identify the strands of meaning that underwrite life and art at large, at times constructing false oppositions and at others finding truth in utter simplicity.

The artist would like to thank the participants: SafiaB, Sa’naa T’Yanna Bishop-Méus, Serena Beaulieu, Tahar Behlouli, Ahmed Benkhalifa, Line Bonneau, Kevin Callahan, Anna Maria Camino, Paul Anthony Clarke, Lucille Garant, Charles-Antoine Gosselin, Amanda Gutierrez, Banafsheh Hassani, Hunnayna Hemed, Susana Hennessey Lavery, Dorothy Hunter, Eugénie Jobin, Leslie Kapo, Modibo Keita, Gabriel Lajournade, Kendra McDonald, Robin Price, Richard Quirion, Florencia Sosa Rey, Troy Tailfeathers, Andrew Woods.

Drawing on oral storytelling, documentary practice and social pedagogy, Veronica Mockler's work treats the experience of speaking and listening to others as a political art form. Since 2022, she has been an artist-in-residence at the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University as part of the UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism, in which she focuses on the challenge of institutional inclusion and class solidarity in the face of increased global polarization. She is also a founding member of BANAL, a music and performance collective dedicated to the sensing of contentious public opinion. Mockler’s collaborations with BANAL collective have been included in programs at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City. Her video installation, The Third Screen, premiered at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling's Acts of Listening Lab (Concordia University) and was presented at UNIONDOCS (New York) and at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida). In 2023, she was invited as a researcher-artist to the Tokyo Art Farm Festival, in the context of the Tokyo Biennale.

The present exhibition includes a booklet of essays by some of À l’image — Takeover’s participants describing their experience. To access the eight À l’image — Takeover projects and know more about its participants: