each hand as they are called reflects on Toronto’s Kensington Market as the vibrant site of diverse transnational histories, layered with personal stories and fragmented by the movement of time. Taking the ephemeral nature of experience in urban space to heart, Katz works with the notion of transition and movement through a series of solo and collaborative performances, temporary installations, community projects, and public posters. Katz frames the culture of the Market through the lens of social and generational memory, its streets and buildings offering shelter, nourishment, and context to her personal story of queer desire and grassroots organizing. each hand as they are called captures the spirit of the Market in its 24-hour wonder, filled with passing memorial vignettes that emerge and disappear with sudden ferocity.

Sound:

Roaming, live vocal performances insert an experimental soundtrack of assimilation, anachronism and hybridity into Katz’s Market landscape. Based on the jazz-fusion music of the Barry Sisters, a Yiddish-speaking sister duo who rose to popularity in the late 1950s, Katz’s haunting compositions are arranged backwards for a cappella duets, their genders varied and playful. The resulting absurd vocals create a haunted, sensual language of calls and beckoning within the Market streetscape.

Scaffolding:

Katz performs solo against the backdrop of Kensington Market’s tense relationship to urban development. At odd and unexpected hours, she will be seen working on temporary structures, building and deconstructing scaffolding in undisclosed locations. The sites of these interventions are defined by a mix of her gallivanting adolescence, Kensington’s radical history and the markers of its Yiddish-speaking past. Positioning the act of construction as obstruction, Katz’s scaffolding performances gesture to the maps of coming out, Spadina Avenue’s incredible labour history and to memory itself as construct.

Social performance:

The community-based component of the project involves Katz working with senior residents from the Terraces at Baycrest and grade eight students from Ryerson Community Public School. Together, their working process will highlight Kensington as the important meeting point of Jewish and East Asian cultures through the game of Mah Jongg, a game that originated in China, migrated west, and was popularized with North American Jewish women during the 1920s. The project culminates in a public day of inter-generational Mah Jongg in the Market’s Bellevue Park.

While the totality of Katz’s performative and social gestures are fleeting, each hand as they are called will have a constant presence in Kensington through a series of interrelated street posters, designed by Katz in collaboration with award-winning designer and artist Cecilia Berkovic. The posters provide additional context for the project while inserting a distinct visual presence amongst the eclectic mix of band-posters, lost pets announcements, political events, and other posted ephemera populating the Market. With these posters, Katz adds her voice to the living archive of text and images that make up the Market’s singular street esthetic.