45th Parallel focuses on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House—a unique municipal site between the jurisdictions of Canada and the United States. Constructed in 1904 under the patronage of the local Haskell family, this building was deliberately designed to straddle the frontier between Canada and the US as a symbolic act of unity in the transnational town of
Abu Hamdan wrote a monologue and devised a performance for this only dual-jurisdiction opera house in the world. Working on site to activate the legal and symbolic potential of the Haskell building, the artist’s script is performed by the acclaimed Mahdi Fleifel. The story that unfolds, centres on Hernández v. Mesa, a judicial case covering a fatal, cross-border shooting of an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican national in 2010 by a US Border Patrol agent. In 2019, when the case reached the Supreme Court, the Office of the President of the United States intervened in favour of Mesa—the border guard—to claim that, as the firearm was discharged on US soil and the murder of Hernández took place in Mexico, the guard could not be prosecuted in the US. The case was debated at the Supreme Court, where judges were openly fearful that Mesa’s prosecution would create a precedential vulnerability that could lead families impacted by US drone strikes to seek
The performance about one border conflict is set on the site of a legal area and looks at how each border implicates the other, and how borders are not lines but, rather, richly layered spaces. Each act of the performance is demarcated by a scenographic change in the hand-painted backdrops behind the performer. First, is the original Opera House's backdrop of a Venice canal, followed by two new hand-painted backdrops created by the artist that will also hang at Mercer Union. One references a 1920 painting by artist Richard Carline of an aerial view of Damascus and its surrounding landscape, and the other depicts the concrete culvert of the 2010 El Paso–Juárez cross-border shooting.
The video and backdrops presented at Mercer Union serve as a portrait of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House to tell stories of permeable borders and impermeable laws, as a reflection on how free movement, free knowledge, and free space remain under threat.
45th Parallel is developed in collaboration with and presented as part of the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art. Titled, What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, the Biennial exhibition is open and free to the public from March 26 — June 5, 2022, and takes place in multiple locations across the city. For more information visit torontobiennial.org.
45th Parallel, is the second project in Mercer Union’s Artist First commissioning platform and Abu Hamdan’s first institutional solo exhibition in Canada.
