What We Bury, What We Build - Contemporary Calgary Opens its Fall Season with Two New Solo Exhibitions by Curtis Talwst Santiago and Jane Jin Kaisen
Curtis Talwst Santiago. A lineup for lineups must be Friday. Always that one barber on the damn phone! Bruh, can you please finish my fade!?, 2022
What We Bury, What We Build
Contemporary Calgary Opens its Fall Season with Two New Solo Exhibitions by Curtis Talwst Santiago and
Calgary, AB (September 15, 2026): On Thursday, September 17, Contemporary Calgary celebrates the opening of two solo exhibitions that approach the same question from opposite ends: what has to change before something new can begin?
In Burial of This Order, Danish-Korean artist Jane Jin Kaisen stages a funeral for a world built on hierarchy and division. In worlds, worlds, worlds, Trinidadian-Canadian artist Curtis Talwst Santiago places intimate, handmade worlds inside the vast systems that move information, goods and people. One buries an order. The other shows us the one we are living in. Seen together, they form a portrait of a moment when the old order feels obsolete and the next one has yet to be shaped.
These two exhibitions open a season about change: how worlds end, how they get rebuilt, and who decides what carries forward. The timing is fitting, as Contemporary Calgary is preparing for its own reimagining with the Centennial Planetarium Transformation Project.
“One of these shows is about letting go, the other is about what we keep,” says David Leinster, CEO of Contemporary Calgary. “This feels like a fitting way to open the season, particularly as a moment of significant change is approaching for us here at Contemporary Calgary.”
Opening Night Thursday, September 17, 2026 Doors 6 PM | Remarks 7 PM, Atrium | Galleries close 9 PM Contemporary Calgary, 701 11 Street SW, Calgary, Alberta Free to the public. No registration required.
Media are invited to contact:
Jason Krell, Public Relations Contact for Contemporary Calgary
jk@jasonkrell.ca | 403.862.7380
Contemporary Calgary believes that art is essential.
The gallery exists to create a place of wonder and belonging where everyone is invited to imagine, learn and understand one another and the world we share through the power of contemporary art.
As a non-collecting public art gallery, Contemporary Calgary presents local, national and international contemporary art in all its forms. Exhibitions, public programs, educational activities and multi-disciplinary collaborations deepen the exploration of contemporary art and engage audiences in conversations around current ideas. Contemporary Calgary is located in the historic Centennial Planetarium, an iconic cultural space in the Downtown West End.
Curtis Talwst Santiago: worlds, worlds, worlds
Theme: World-building, community, social fabric, labour, collective memory
Additional Resources and Full Artist Bio: Contemporary Calgary
Medium: Mixed media dioramas in reclaimed jewellery boxes within a scenography of transmission
Curated by Kanika Anand, Senior Curator in the Flanagan Family Gallery September 17, 2026 to January 3, 2027
“There is an innocence and tenderness in the worlds that Curtis builds, but also an awareness of the disillusions, ruptures, and contradictions that surround us. Moving through the exhibition is a sensorial journey, an invitation to think through the worlds we inherit and inhabit, and the possibilities we imagine. At a moment when cultural gatekeeping, rigid hierarchies of knowledge, and fear of difference continue to structure public discourse, worlds, worlds, worlds affirms curiosity, and the will to community as practices of repair and collective imagining.”
- Kanika Anand, Senior Curator
What Visitors Will See
worlds, worlds, worlds unfolds on multiple scales at once. The Infinity Series dioramas are miniature worlds staged inside jewellery boxes and found containers, each asking to be approached closely and read slowly. They depict scenes that move between personal memories of Caribbean community life like basement dance parties and the quintessential barbershop, and broader collective histories of movement and displacement.
The dioramas are presented within a scenography of transmission: horns, pipes, channels and circuitry. Built from upcycled cardboard, these structures situate the diorama-worlds inside larger infrastructures of digital networks, material circulation and surveillance capitalism, where meaning is generated, disrupted and redirected. Like the jewellery boxes that hold something precious, cardboard protects and contains other objects before being discarded.
The exhibition sits somewhere between a factory and a workshop, with fragmentory moments that invite close observation of the worlds that we inherit, inhabit and continually shape.
Things to Consider
How are we situated within larger networks of production and exchange?
How does storytelling preserve the cultural meaning of a people across geographies, and across generations?
How is our world shaped by the encounters of peoples? How do we overcome rigid hierarchies of knowledge?
How do we build community through acts of repair and collective imagining?
Jane Jin Kaisen: Burial of This Order
Theme: Renewal, community, ritual
Additional Resources and Full Artist Bio: Contemporary Calgary
Medium: Single-channel films, 4K
Curated by Noa Bronstein in the Morris & Ann Dancyger Observatory Gallery September 3, 2026 to January 10, 2027
“Burial of This Order evokes urgent questions surrounding our current condition and what possibilities we might imagine for the future. Kaisen’s poetic meditations on place, ritual and collectivity invite viewers to consider how we might build new systems and structures that sustain and nurture us ecologically, socially and politically.” - Noa Bronstein, Guest Curator
What Visitors Will See
Burial of This Order is an exhibition of three moving image works, anchored by Kaisen's titular video installation. The film follows a funerary procession of artists, poets and activists gathered to bury a world order built on hierarchy and division, a ceremony that breaks its own rules and ends in refusal rather than mourning.
Two accompanying works build out the world around it. Sorrow Waters This Land dwells on the site of the procession, a resort on Jeju Island abandoned after the financial crisis of the 1990s and left to decay in place. Dokkaebi summons the trickster deities of Korean folklore, unpredictable figures who move through space with a charge that is by turns menacing and generative. Together the works offer visitors an allegory of societal ruin, its haunting spirits, and the social movement that propels change.
Things to Consider
What would it take to declare an era “finished”?
Who is asked to carry the weight of a system's collapse?
When does a ritual stop performing order and start dismantling it?
If this order were buried, what would you want built in its place?