Opening: 03 Sept 2026 at 6:30 p.m.
Gallery 1313 presents Transhumance, an international group exhibition bringing together four Italian contemporary artists whose practices investigate movement, memory, landscape, identity, and transformation. Featuring works by Domenico Mendicino, Bislak, Antonella Rocca, and Andrea Grosso Ciponte, the exhibition considers the ancient practice of transhumance as a powerful metaphor for contemporary artistic experience.
Traditionally, transhumance describes the seasonal migration of people and animals in search of more fertile land. Beyond its agricultural origins, it represents adaptation, resilience, exchange, and the continual negotiation between place and identity. In today’s interconnected world, artists undertake their own form of transhumance — crossing geographical, cultural, and linguistic borders while carrying with them personal histories, collective memory, and evolving perspectives.
The exhibition explores how artistic practice itself becomes an act of migration. Ideas move between territories. Visual languages shift through encounters with different cultures. Memory is continually reshaped through displacement and dialogue. Like the ancient routes that once connected distant communities, contemporary art creates new pathways across borders, generating spaces where identities intersect and new forms of expression emerge.
Rather than presenting migration solely as physical movement, Transhumance proposes it as a condition of creative practice. Each participating artist approaches this idea from a distinct perspective, examining relationships between landscape, material, society, history, and personal identity.
Photographer Domenico Mendicino investigates the symbolic and emotional presence of the Calabrian landscape through restrained monochromatic imagery that explores silence, memory, and perception.
Visual artist and muralist Bislak employs a minimalist, surreal visual language to examine the relationship between the individual and contemporary society through irony, public art, and illustration.
Sculptor Antonella Rocca transforms discarded domestic cutlery into intricate sculptural forms that question permanence, belonging, and the shifting meanings of everyday objects. Her work explores migration through material transformation, where familiar objects acquire new identities and symbolic lives.
Multidisciplinary artist Andrea Grosso Ciponte combines illustration, painting, comics, and visual storytelling to explore historical memory, political narratives, and the enduring power of images to communicate across cultures and generations.
Together, the works reveal migration not simply as movement across geography but as an ongoing process of cultural translation and artistic reinvention. Transhumance invites audiences to consider how artists navigate multiple worlds, carrying with them fragments of memory while continuously creating new visual territories.
As one of Toronto’s longest-running artist-run centres, Gallery 1313 has supported experimental and contemporary artistic practices for more than two decades. Located in the heart of Parkdale, the gallery provides a platform for local, national, and international artists whose work engages critically with contemporary social and cultural issues.
In Transhumance, the gallery becomes a site of passage—where different artistic voices converge, dialogue unfolds, and new cultural landscapes emerge.
Contact:
Antonella Rocca
antonellarocca84@gmail.com
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