Répondez s’il vous plaît (RSVP)
JUNE 7 – 28, 2025
Répondez s’il vous plaît: RSVP at the Campbell
House Museum
Curated by Gia Liapi
Curatorial Assistant: Abisola Oni
Opening: Saturday, June 7, 2025, 5pm-8pm.
Duration: June 7-28, 2025.
Closing: June 28, 2025
Performance: Chipo Chipaziwa
Slipping Into Slipping Away.
Friday, June 27, 6pm.
Participating Artists: Chipo Chipaziwa, Andy Fabo, Georgia Fambris, Sameer, Farooq, Kyriaki Goni, Maureen Gruben, Julius Manapul, Eva Papamargariti, Nicolas Sassoon, Ezzo Scourti, Lou Sheppard, Evann Siebens, Chrysanne Stathacos, Theo Triantafillidis, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, Marina Velisioti, Iria Vrettou, Meichen Waxer.
Répondez s’il vous plaît (RSVP) is a group exhibition featuring a mix of regional and international artists, presented at Campbell House Museum in Toronto, Ontario.
By reflecting on the entangled histories of capitalism, colonialism, sexual identities, and diasporic embodiment, Répondez s’il vous plaît aims to complicate temporal narratives and inquire: Which histories are granted legitimacy and visibility? What monuments are preserved, archived, and remembered?
Curated by Gia Liapi, RSVP builds upon the foundation of its predecessor, Paradoxical e-Traditions, held in Athens, Greece at PET Projects in 2022. Now situated within the Campbell House, a longstanding colonial heritage site, the exhibition transforms to overlay the histories of this Treaty 13 land with anti-colonial countervisions. RSVP interlaces digital-era convention and analog tradition with themes of displacement and alienation, emphasizing the embodiment of resistance. Notions of dance and choreography function as modes of both artistic expression and visitor engagement with the space.
The artists’ gestures are rooted in the lived experiences of diasporic, trans and sexually diverse communities, gathering to offer responsive expressions across time and territory. The intergenerational group of artists disentangle colonial legacies through moving image, drawing, sound, printmaking, collage, and performance, exposing contradictions that linger in the interplay of appropriation and erasure. Their works complicate the ways social, cultural and sexual identities are declared, defied, or imposed—not to resolve these tensions, but to unsettle established narratives and shift the dialogues on belonging and coexistence beyond bounded spaces.
Built in 1822, Campbell House was designed to embody principles of entertainment and comfort, asserting the social and economic status of Sir William and Lady Hannah Campbell. Its spatial layout—withdrawing room, dining room, ballroom—reflects colonial urban ontologies of gathering shaped by rigid gender and class binaries. Against this backdrop, the artistic responses emerge as counter-maps of intimacy, risk, pleasure, and community, resisting and reimagining heteronormative, capitalist colonial geographies.
In keeping with the social character of the site, the exhibition title Répondez s’il vous plaît takes the form of the familiar francophone acronym—as a perpetuating vestige of Eurocentric colonial behavorial norms through linguistic form—to imply that a gathering is underway, and that you are invited to respond. At the same time, its use highlights the temporary and exclusive nature of participation in this space.
The works interact, giving shape to a collective dance that inhabit and disrupt the temporal hegemony of the monumental. The collective gathering becomes an embodied form of resistance, manifesting in bodies in motion juxtaposed with those at rest. The artists engages a range of media interwoven with notions of tradition, both in reference to the existing decorative elements and in the artists’ diverse approaches to the conventions of their media. Paradoxically, their works move through time and transcend tradition, offering speculative visions of possible futures amid shifting social and ecological landscapes.
Répondez s’il vous plaît invites critical reflection on how Western traditions reproduce hegemonic norms that exclude trans, queer, racialized, and migrant subjectivities, while also highlighting how counter-mobilizations of transnational and transgender embodiments and approaches to space can amplify marginalized expressions. Through the contentions of the exhibition, Campbell House is not merely a backdrop but unsettles historical memory. Its walls hold a living ecosystem of queer kinships rather than serving as a passive vessel for colonial legacies. It, too, has endured displacement, surviving neo-colonial capitalist forces under the guise of gentrification. By unearthing narratives from the overlayered histories, and queering the colonial ideological decorations manifesting in the house’s aesthetic, the exhibition ultimately invites you to reserve your spot here, in the coexistence of multilayered inheritances.
Special thanks to:
Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Catriona Jeffries, Cooper Cole, Gallerie Nicolas Roberts, Images Festival, The Breeder, Wil Aballe, Zoumboulakis Galleries.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts