Moniker press - CENTO

CENTO

dani neira, Vida Beyer, Nour Bishouty, Hazel Meyer, Philip Leonard Ocampo, Dana Qaddah

cento (noun)

a piece of writing, especially a poem, composed wholly of quotations from the works of other authors.

anything composed of incongruous parts; conglomeration.

Obsolete. a patchwork.

CENTO is a loose-leaf, interactive artist book that features artist editions including a functional fortune-teller, bookplates with performance prompts, gossipy booklets, shape-shifting forms, existential meditations, and curatorial musings.

Through its expanded book form, CENTO extends its namesakes’ literary tradition and embraces the language of patchwork as a reparative method. Piecing together personal, cultural, historical, and speculative fragments, the publication explores a non-linear gathering and layering of meaning.

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Edition of 150

ISBN 978-1-989428-19-1

Co-Published by Moniker Press, Open Space

Curator — Dani Neira

Design, Layout — Moniker Press, Dani Neira

Risograph Printing — Moniker Press

Victoria / Vancouver, BC – 2024

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THANK YOUs

Thank you to Open Space, Doug Jarvis, Cassia Powell, dani neira and the artists.

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ARTIST BIOS

Vida Beyer is an artist who blends the personal with an archive of artifacts, pictures and stories from popular and unpopular culture as a means to cultivate potential sites of recognition.

Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing. Broadly concerned with gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy, her practice explores notions of permission and articulation in cultural narratives overwritten by dispossession and displacement. 

Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Meyer’s work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender-outlaws, incontinent-queers—into a performative space that centres desire, queerness, and sweat.

Philip Leonard Ocampo is an artist and arts facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. Ocampo’s multidisciplinary practice involves painting, sculpture, writing and curatorial projects. Exploring worldbuilding, radical hope and speculative futures, Ocampo’s work embodies a curious cross between magic wonder and the nostalgic imaginary. Following the tangents, histories and canons of popular culture, Ocampo is interested in how unearthing cultural touchstones of past / current times may therefore serve as catalysts for broader conversations about lived experiences; personal, collective, diasporic, etc.

Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist & independent curator currently based on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish territory. Qaddah’s practice uses archives of personal & itinerant cultural knowledge to traverse themes of Arab futurism & storytelling, while reflecting on the condition of being abstracted from the destruction of one’s own sense of self & place.

dani neira is a second-generation settler of mixed Colombian ancestry based in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their interdisciplinary practice involves curatorial projects, independent publishing, art writing, and visual art. Exploring memory, language and built environments, their work embraces affective knowledge and the queer slippages which occur in everyday life. Dani holds a BA in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Victoria, and is 1/2 of the curatorial project Dirty Dishes Collective. 

OPEN SPACE  is a non-profit artist-run centre situated on unceded Lekwungen territory in Victoria, British Columbia. Since its founding in 1972, Open Space has worked to present contemporary visual arts, music, writing, media arts and more.