Flowers While We Are Living is a film and a portraiture project centering and celebrating 2S/ trans people from across Northern Turtle Island, focusing on joy and survival. Each drawing/painting in the series features a mixed media approach to depicting trans people alongside their favourite flowers. The short film Flowers While We’re Living focuses on the creation of the project during the residency at Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2024.
For the 2022 Toronto Biennial, Syrus Marcus Ware presents MBL: Freedom (2022). This work is the next chapter of the saga, wherein the three Black, Indigenous, and POC Antarcticans flee the Company’s territories and abandon their mission to colonize Antarctica, swimming in icy waters toward the only part of the continent not claimed by a country, “Mary Bird Land,” or MBL.
MBL: Freedom (2022) is commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and made possible with the generous support of the Age of Union Alliance.
Ancestors, Can you Read Us? (Dispatches From The Future), Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Between September 11 and December 8 of 2019, Syrus Marcus Ware’s multi-channel video work Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future) was on view at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The video, created with Mishann Lau, features performers Kyisha Williams, Rodney Diverlus, Raven Davis, Janine Carrington, Ravyn Wngz, Gloria Swain, and Jasmyn Fyfe. The work imagines and stages a dialogue with a future beyond the current epoch of Black social death and insecurity, marked by the ever-present capitalist forces of greed and the persistent script of police and state violence.
