CAFKA.25

CAFKA.25 runs from June 7 - July 26, 2025. Both pieces will be on extended exhibition at Schneider Haus until the end of September 2025.

Schneider Haus is home to two exhibits as part of CAFKA.25: Field Guide to the Understory.

This land is my land, this land is your land by Don Kwan

In “This land is my land, this land is your land”, Don Kwan evokes the Muskoka chair, as a fixture of outdoor cottage living and an iconic symbol of Canadian nationalism in pop culture. At first glance, Don Kwan’s chairs echo the idea of gathering and inclusion. Upon closer inspection, however, the chairs are inaccessible, fastened together in a tightly closed circle. The audience is invited to reflect on their sense of belonging and to engage in a dialogue about the ongoing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Who belongs here?

About Don Kwan

A third-generation Chinese Canadian, Don Kwan turns to his own experiences and challenges of being a gay, East Asian artist as a way to ground in broader conversations about identity, representations, and intergenerational memory-making in the diaspora. 

Kwan regularly draws from common and powerfully symbolic found objects and forms. He redeploys them in provocative and playful ways; delivering complex, and nuanced concepts in an open framework for interpretation that evokes both familiarity and wonder. 

Red adirondak chairs connected in a circle

In the Room Alone by Miles Rufelds

“In the Room Alone” is located in the attic of Schneider Haus. It is a site-specific experimental essay film by Miles Rufelds about Waterloo Region's deep and fascinating history of spirit communication communities, specifically drawing from a community of gathers circa 1930s - 1960s centred on spirit medium Thomas Lacey. In its essayistic voice, “In the Room Alone” traces how spiritualist communities grew in response to developments of colonialism, capitalism, and the attendant deconstruction of communal space and time.

About Miles Rufelds

Miles Rufelds is an artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Toronto, whose exhibitions, films, and lecture-performances pull narrative threads from the wreckage of capitalist modernity, mixing extensive factual research with speculative reinterpretation. His projects critique the braided histories of industrialism, science, technology, and aesthetics, and explore the social forms that have arisen to make sense of the world in their wake, from occultism to conspiracism.
 
Rufelds holds a Master of Visual Studies in studio art from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. Rufelds exhibits widely in Canada, abroad in the US and Iceland, and is a co-founder and co-director of 'the plumb' in Toronto.
tv on the floor of a dark room playing video