On Closeness

Explores closeness as a minoritarian method in contemporary art and performance.

On Closeness explores closeness as a transformative, if sometimes fraught, mode of engagement across aesthetic, social, and scholarly realms. Olivia Michiko Gagnon theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method that refuses knowledge grounded in possession or mastery in favor of relational ethics defined by vulnerability, partiality, and unknowing. Insisting upon the political urgencies of remaining in close proximity across difference, these forms of relation—with history and archives, artworks and others—privilege embodied and sensuous ways of knowing and remembering that salve historical violence.


Analyzing contemporary artworks and performances by Tanya Tagaq, asinnajaq, Cheryl Sim, Elizabeth M. Webb, Pia Arke, and Monika Kin Gagnon—her mother and an influential cultural critic and scholar—Gagnon engages entangled histories of colonialism, slavery, migration, and diaspora. Grounded in performance studies and in dialogue with gender and sexuality studies, critical Indigenous studies, Black studies, American studies, critical mixed race studies, Asian Canadian studies, and film and media studies, On Closeness stages an antiracist, decolonial, and feminist intervention. Adopting closeness as her own method, Gagnon shows how the concept opens up new possibilities for relation across difference, historical sense-making, and knowledge production within and beyond the university.