Matt Nish-Lapidus, Request for Comment (RFC) (detail), 2022. Karthik Pandian, மனசு (manasu), 2025. Courtesy the artist. Kent Chan, The Burning of a Museum, 2026. Courtesy the artist. Anahita Norouzi, The Weight of Distant Objects, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nicolas Robert. Nikita Gale, GRAVITY SOLO III (HYPERPERFORMANCE), 2025. Courtesy Petzel Gallery. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.
The “art gallery problem” is a well-known math problem with a simple premise: what is the minimum number of guards or surveillance cameras necessary to observe an entire gallery? Across different layouts and floorplans, the art gallery problem challenges math students to achieve full surveillance of a space using the minimum labour or technology. The problem is not put to use by major museums and galleries, despite replicating their standard practices for monitoring facilities. Even so, it remains a dominant understanding of art’s presentation.
This exhibition appropriates the art gallery problem as a framework to consider how objects and bodies are put to work in galleries and museums. The “problem”is in fact not singular: there is far more to the presentation of art than the securitization of objects; there are problems of narrative, representation, hegemony, and access to knowledge.
The art gallery problem highlights a set of underlying assumptions that animate museums and galleries, including surveillance, labour, visuality, law, and ownership. As significant human labour and technologies are mobilized for the preservation and display of objects, it bears asking: Do norms of exhibition and display serve audiences and galleries alike? What are the alternatives to reification, permanence, ownership, and surveillance? What are other ways for living with objects?
For a full curatorial essay and additional details, see Dazibao's website.
Exhibition Opening
An exhibition opening will be held at 6pm, Thursday, February 5 at Dazibao.
Accessibility
5455, de Gaspé avenue has a wheelchair-accessible ramp on the northwest side of the building. Dazibao is located on the ground floor.
Feb 05, 2026 – Apr 04, 2026
Upcoming
The Art Gallery Problem at Dazibao
Presented at Dazibao
5455, de Gaspé Avenue, Suite 109, Montreal
Co-presented by The Blackwood
Artists: Kent Chan, Nikita Gale, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Anahita Norouzi, Karthik Pandian, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions. He is a former resident of Gasworks, Art Explora, MMCA Residency Changdong, Pivô Research, Jan van Eyck Academie and NTU CCA Singapore. He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, National University Singapore Museum, and de Appel. His works and films have been exhibited in institutions and festivals including Tate Modern, Liverpool Biennial, Videobrasil, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Times Museum, EYE Film Museum, Onassis Stegi, and Bienalsur. He is the 2023 winner of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Award and Impart Art Prize, and 2021 winner of Foundwork Artist Prize. His works are collected by the Kadist Foundation, the Rijkscollectie, Netherlands, Bonnefanten Museum, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, and other institutions.
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. The artist holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and an MFA in New Genres from UCLA. Gale's work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist's practice is that the structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed. Gale’s broad-ranging installations—often comprising concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting—blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. The artist’s work has recently been exhibited in the 2024 Whitney Biennial (New York); Chisenhale (London); LAXART (Los Angeles); 52 Walker (New York); MoMA PS1 (New York); Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin); Swiss Institute (New York); California African American Museum (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale is represented by Petzel (New York), 56 Henry (New York), Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles), and Emalin (London).
Matt Nish-Lapidus is an artist and musician based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Matt’s varied practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture, its histories, and its impacts on society, people, and his own life. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. Matt has performed and exhibited locally and internationally including MOCA (Toronto), The Power Plant (Toronto), INDEX Biennial (Braga), ACUD Macht Neu (Berlin), Electric Eclectics (Meaford), InterAccess (Toronto), ZKM (Karlsruhe), and more including many DIY community spaces. You can find Matt online and away-from-keyboard under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendencies, and
Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist, originally from Tehran and active in Montreal since 2018. Her practice is research-driven, informed by marginalized histories, focusing on themes of resource extraction, colonialism, and the relationship between humans and land. Articulated across a range of materials and mediums—including video, sculpture, installation, photography—her work challenges institutional authority by reclaiming personal narratives and collective memories embedded in archives, museum collections, and herbarium pages, ultimately dissecting how power operates through systems of classification, representation, and historical erasure.
Karthik Pandian is an artist working to unsettle colonial time. He uses film, sculpture, drawing, and performance to find openings into collective liberation. Supported by a 2022 Creative Capital Award and a 2024 MacDowell Fellowship, Karthik is currently at work on his debut feature film, Lucid Decapitation. The film is a collaboration with Mike Forcia (Bad River Anishinaabe), the American Indian Movement activist who orchestrated the takedown of the Columbus monument at the Minnesota State Capitol in June of 2020. Karthik has presented his work internationally at exhibition venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer, and the Palais de Tokyo and on digital platforms such as the Criterion Channel and Triple Canopy. He is a professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a guide, certified in offering Lama Rod Owens’ Seven Homecomings practice.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s work, spanning roles as artist, composer, and performer, considers errant relations that push toward the limits of subjectivity. Toussaint-Baptiste’s fellowships and awards include the Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellowship, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Sound Artist-In-Residence, Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design, the Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center, Issue Project Room 2017 Artist-In-Residence, and the Rauschenberg Residency 381 Residency. Recent exhibitions and performances include Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, California; The Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; Berlin Atonal, Berlin, Germany; MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Performance Space, New York, New York; The Kitchen, Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York. They are an Assistant Professor in Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and current Triple Canopy Fellow.
Fraser McCallum is Project Coordinator at the Blackwood Gallery. In this role, he works primarily on programs outside of the gallery spaces, including offsite exhibitions, public programs, virtual programming, and publications. Fraser is an interdisciplinary artist of settler Euro-Canadian ancestry, whose practice often draws together histories and ongoing sociopolitical conditions through archives, places, and stories. Fraser has held previous roles at Gallery 44 and Art Metropole, and received a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. His work has been exhibited at HKW, Berlin; Sheridan College, Oakville; Modern Fuel, Kingston; and The Art Museum at the University of Toronto. His video works have been screened by the plumb, LIFT, Hamilton Artists Inc., and Trinity Square Video. Fraser’s writing has been published in the Blackwood’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge series, PUBLIC, and Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies.
The Blackwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada Council for the Arts, and Ontario Arts Council.
This exhibition was first presented by The Blackwood, January 8 – March 5, 2025, with the additional support of the Jackman Humanities Institute, Instituta Italiano di Cultura, and Mondriaan Fund.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm.
