With Opened Mouths: The Podcast

In this episode, Qanita Lilla talks with Emebet Belete about her community-driven art projects and her passion for arts education. Emebet shares how her art has been influenced by her youth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, global travels, and how her art practice has evolved to include large-scale projects which cover pieces of public infrastructure through a process called “yarn storming.”

In this episode, Garth Erasmus, South African artist and musician talks with Qanita Lilla about how the experience of apartheid and forced removals shaped his artistic practice. He talks about navigating a white world and of balancing the urgent need to respond to the trauma of apartheid while cultivating his artistic voice. Sound work and music provided a useful medium toward healing for Garth, and it allowed a means towards embracing an Indigenous Khoisan identity.   Music highlighted in this episode: Garth Ersamus. “Threnody for the KhoiSan.” Threnody for the KhoiSan, TAL, 2024, #7. Courtesy of the artist

Artist Jega Delisca talks with Qanita Lilla about his portraiture practice and how he makes his sitters feel seen by empathizing with their vulnerability. He talks about the importance of building rapport and trust but also of activating a balanced understanding of Black masculinity. Jega’s artistic practice challenges male emotional blindness and he talks about how he moved from painting portraits of others to opening his apartment as a gallery and becoming vulnerable himself.

Faten Nastas Mitwasi talks with Qanita Lilla about growing up in Bethlehem in occupied Palestine, the artistic sensibilities she inherited from her parents, and establishing a career as an artist, curator, scholar and arts administrator. Faten shares the physical and emotional challenges of attending art school in Israel and the joys of making site-specific and community-engaged art in Palestine and around the world. This conversation shows that contemporary Palestinian art is rich in humor, experimentation and full of hope for the future.

Jill Glatt speaks to Qanita Lilla about her large textile pieces informed by local ecologies, community and sustainability. Her practice emphasises the pathways and airways that both seeds and people navigate before they settle. Jill’s work weaves storytelling and botanical dyes together in ways that bring the outside world into the museum space. In this episode, they talk about personal and artistic journeys and the joys of teaching art.

In this episode, Qanita Lilla talks with Jessica Karuhanga about her creative journeys from Sarnia, in south western Ontario to London, Ontario. Jessica talks about how her personal geographies shapes her artistic practice. She also talks about Black embodiment, about the audible demands of space, and of moving toward art as experience and embodiment.

In this episode, artist Anthony Gebrehiwot and Qanita Lilla talk about his photography and digital art practice. Anthony describes the future-thinking themes of his work as being premised on the possibilities of a community of “like-hearted” people who can uplift each other towards new modes of living. Together, they talk about his artworks, Mahaba (2024), an ongoing research project that is shared in its early phases as part of Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys on view at Museum London, and Echoes of Devotion (2024), a digital mural on the Queen’s University campus.   Anthony Gebrehiwot’s Mahaba (2024) is on view as part of Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys (21 November 2024- 11 May 2025), a travelling exhibition, developed by Agnes and hosted by Museum London. 

In the inaugural episode of season three, artist Camille Turner talks with Qanita Lilla about how she balances humour, healing and storytelling to recover Black histories in Canada. In her work, Camille lovingly assembles the detritus of the archive, with its sparse and often painful accounts of Black life. She invokes personas and performance, like in Miss Canadiana and Afronautic Research Lab, Camille navigates the currents of submerged histories and resurfaces stories lost in the archive. As the Afronaut and Miss Canadiana fall into the past, they project the future and conjure new liberated possibilities. Camille Turner’s Nave (2022) is on view as part of Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys (21 November 2024- 11 May 2025), a travelling exhibition, developed by Agnes and hosted by Museum London. 

Have you ever wondered: What is the purpose of an artist in the world today?    We are back with a third season of With Opened Mouths: The Podcast. The podcast that makes space for artists, poets, performers, activists and curators to speak for themselves. I’m your host Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator, Arts of Africa at Agnes Etherington Art Center.   Join us as we hear stories about creative visions that powerfully convey why art and artists are critically important right now. In this season my guests and I discuss: ways of being in the world, possibilities for liberatory futures, the essential nature of collective practice and the need for Spiritual growth—all as means for Survival!   Episodes of With Opened Mouths are released monthly, and you can find them on Digital Agnes, CFRC’s website and on your favourite podcasting platform starting in January 2025!  Make sure to subscribe now so that you don’t miss a single episode!

Emelie Chhangur, Director Curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre talks with Qanita Lilla about her radical curatorial practice. Growing up in Paris, Ontario in an assimilationist paradigm, she talks of harnessing experimentation and rejecting the confines of the status quo. Emelie’s lived experience of cultural mixing and of negotiating multiple worlds allows her to open up curatorial practice to non-Western traditions but also to bring together forms that might not have a natural affinity. She describes her practice as scrappy, experimental and unexpected worldmaking that started in a bright yellow kitchen.  Show notes: https://bit.ly/3CU6Znk  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3kiWzaw  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

In artist Rajni Parera’s marbled landscapes, mutant travellers traverse interstellar terrains as regal environmental combatants. Hers is a multiverse of jewel-coloured intensity, of hairy spoons and delicate seed pods all of whom co-exist as equals in a realm where only the gentle survive. Which life events birthed these ideas and which everyday materialities were harnessed to propel Rajni’s practice ‘to infinity and beyond’? Show notes: https://bit.ly/3QKKxmv  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3ZGpOnT  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

For poet Juliane Okot Bitek storytelling was always in the air. In this episode, she shares with Qanita Lilla that stories have the power to transform who we are and how we situate ourselves in the world. Juliane describes the precarity of belonging, the unexpected joys of ‘unsettlement’, intergenerational memory (contained in the beauty of Acholi mosquito ‘nests’) as new modalities through which to navigate the past. These things and more shape a world where the ghost of Joseph Conrad is finally exorcised and a glorious, wild apparition of a woman without language is conjured in his place. She lives in the gaps on Juliane’s page, slides off the run-on lines and sits between the repetitions, only to emerge with her back turned as she walks into the crowd. Show notes: https://bit.ly/3kpJJqQ  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3Xhua38  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

In this episode, Chao Tayiana Maina shares her pathways into the digital humanities and metadata with Qanita Lilla. Framing new structures for African knowledges, she has combined a lifelong love of history with innovative technologies. For Chao, translating history into the digital sphere requires an understanding that information in the archives has a living relevance to real people’s lives. The digital sphere is therefore an important part of history-making and the cultural record, and Chao’s practice has evolved from telling untold stories to holding colonialism to account. Show notes: https://bit.ly/3CNDYtp  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3IPym5Z  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

Visual artist Kosisochukwu (Kosi) Nnebe talks with Qanita Lilla about the rich sources of her artistic practice. Inspired by social theory as well as her lived experience, Kosi creates art that resists the easy consumption of blackness and allows instead for quiet, sometimes disturbing realizations to emerge. Referencing her video installation in the Brown Butter exhibition at Agnes (2022) Kosi shows how the agential repositioning of Black bodies as performers and storytellers serves a liberatory function. Show notes: https://bit.ly/3H9Q3Mg  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3XfAqbP  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

In this episode, poet Billie the Kid talks with Qanita Lilla about honouring stories as living entities. Through storytelling she manifests light, hope and joy. Billie’s practice takes us on a journey through a tapestry of family, poet communities, and resonant connections with mentors. The fundamental humour in her writing emerges as speaking back to what it means to be an Indigenous poet living in Kingston.  Show notes: https://bit.ly/3H66JnV  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3GLhE53  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.  

In this episode, performer and dramaturg, Yousef Kadoura speaks with Qanita Lilla about living an exuberant life as a disabled performer and of surrounding himself with networks of people who share affirmative joy. Expanding the idea of storytelling and re-defining disability, Yousef talks about navigating belonging in a field populated by able bodied performers, and reimagining society in the shape of us all, a society that cares for all its actors, both disabled and able bodied. Show notes: https://bit.ly/3X7udP3  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3IQDwi0  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

In a meeting of hearts, artists Winsom Winsom and Pamila Matharu talk with Qanita Lilla about their journeys and their ongoing mentor-mentee relationship. Winsom sheds light on her rich practice that traverses the globe, including her time in Kingston, and Pamila talks about Fresh Arts and finding her creative community. Together, they discuss vital pedagogies that nurture young artists’s minds and souls. How is Black feminist artistry fostered and what is the lifeblood that sustains it? Show notes: https://bit.ly/3ZCU9np  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3H8sOSE  With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021. The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.  

We are back with a second season of With Opened Mouths: The Podcast, where we give artists, poets, performers, activists and curators a platform to speak about what motivates them to imagine new worlds. Subscribe now and join us every month as we listen to the sometimes-unexpected paths of these exceptional people. With Opened Mouths is back this January.

Jason Cyrus, Ezi Odozor and Qanita Lilla talk together about the creative processes of curating, researching and writing in the Canadian arts sphere. Sharing the enriching journeys around Agnes’s exhibitions Spirit Banter, History Is Rarely Black or White and With Opened Mouths, this episode is about the urgency to have our voices heard, the joy of community and the pain of blood memory. If you’ve ever been confronted with White institutional ‘quick-sand’, struggled with intergenerational trauma, and wondered how to work joyfully in a hostile creative field this one is for you! Meet our guests: Jason Cyrus analyzes fashion and textile history to explore questions of identity, cultural exchange and agency. He is the 2021 Isabel Bader Fellow in Textile Conservation and Research at the Agnes Etherington Centre, Queen’s University. This October he will present his research in History Is Rarely Black or White, an exhibition exploring Victorian cotton, slavery, and its ongoing legacies.  Cyrus has a Master’s Degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies from York University and starts his PhD in the History of Art at Warwick University in October 2021. He has held research posts at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. In January 2020, he curated York University’s first fashion exhibition, ReFraming Gender. Cyrus currently lives on land that has been the home of numerous Indigenous Nations, including the Wendat, Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabek, and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Ezi (Ezinwanne) Odozor is a Nigerian-born writer, student support specialist, and anti-racist practitioner based in Toronto. Her work, both fiction and non-fiction, focuses on themes of identity, culture, gender, race, health and intimacy. Her writing has also been showcased in multiple exhibits, most notably in Oluseye’s “A Room Full of Black Boys,” which was featured on CBC. Find more details on their exhibitions at Agnes:  Spirit Banter: Ezi Odozor (on view 27 November 2021–30 January 2022): https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/spirit-banter-ezi-odozor/  History Is Rarely Black or White (on view 27 November 2021–20 March 2022): https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/history-is-rarely-black-or-white/ With Opened Mouths (on view 7 August 2021 to 30 January 2022): https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/with-opened-mouths/    Episode Transcript: https://bit.ly/3r3nh87  The podcast is hosted by Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021.   The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez.  The podcast is supported by the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.  

Curators and artists, Amy Malbeuf and Jessie Ray Short talk with Qanita Lilla about the many joys of collaborating. Their expansive practice embraces new visions of Métis identity and looks to broaden our view of reality to the outer limits of the known universe. Which unseen forces led them to art and to each other? What keeps them connected?  Meet our guests: Amy Malbeuf is a Métis visual artist from Rich Lake, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory currently living on unceded Mi’kmaq territory in Terence Bay, Nova Scotia. Through mediums such as animal hair tufting, beadwork, installation, performance, and tattooing Malbeuf explores notions of identity, place, language, and ecology. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in over forty shows at such venues as Art Mûr, Montréal, Winnipeg Art Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; and Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua, New Zealand. Malbeuf holds a Native Cultural Arts Instructor Certificate from Portage College and a MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Jessie Ray Short is an artist, filmmaker and independent curator of Métis, Ukrainian and German descent.  Jessie Ray’s practice involves uncovering connections between a myriad of topics that interest her, including, but not limited to, space and time, Indigenous and settler histories, Métis visual culture, personal narratives, spiritual and scientific belief systems, parallel universes, electricity, aliens and non-human being(s). Jessie Ray explores these topics using mediums such as film and video, performance art, finger weaving, sewing, writing and curating. She has been invited to show her work nationally and internationally, including at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, at La Chambre Blanche in Québec City, Art Mûr Berlin (a satellite exhibition of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial/BACA) in Germany, and at the Wairoa Maori Film Festival in New Zealand. Jessie Ray is deeply grateful to be based in oskana kâ-asastêki or Pile of Bones (also known as Regina) in Treaty 4 territory.  Find more details on their exhibition Lii Zoot Tayr (Other Worlds) on view at Agnes from 7 August 2021–30 January 2022: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/other-worlds/  With Opened Mouths is on view at Agnes Etherington Art Centre from 7 August 2021 to 30 January 2022. Learn more about the exhibition on Agnes’s website: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/with-opened-mouths/    Episode Transcript: https://bit.ly/3rOmetc  The podcast is hosted by Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.  Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021.   The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez.  The podcast is supported by the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.