In this act of burial - Part II
On exhibit until May 31, 2026
Schneider Haus
Using an iPad, artist Meghan Harder retraces digitized artifacts to develop digital meditations on fraktur art. Highlighting five common fraktur motifs: birds, flowers, hearts, horses, and stars, the artist weaves new compositions that echo both the contours of the original forms and the architectural geometry of the Schneider Haus façade. While Harder’s digitally simulated drawing process reenacts the gestures of artists in the museum’s permanent collection, the historical objects themselves remain unseen and out of reach. This distance is echoed in the contrast between Harder’s use of the modern CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, “key” [black]) colour space and the naturally pigmented hand-inked artifacts from which they arose. While most ghosts haunt us from the past, Harder's misty drawings glow strangely from the present.
“In this act of burial” is a phrase from scholar Achille Mbembe highlighting how archives a˛x certain narratives while dampening others, privileging institutional control over historical memory. In resisting place-based narratives in service of growth and prosperity, In this act of burial borrows visual cues from wheatpasted panels and public notice boards to consider gaps in traditional archival practices and bring forth overlooked stories, by occupying public lawn space and nudging public memory work beyond the walls of the museum.
About the Artist
Meghan Harder
Meghan Harder is an artist living in St. Catharines, Ontario, working in the areas of drawing, writing, sound, sculpture and installation. She received her MFA from the University of Guelph and has exhibited at Blouin-Division Project Space, Xpace Cultural Centre, Hunt Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area, The Plumb, and the Lincoln Museum.
About the Curator
Shalaka Jadhav
Shalaka Jadhav is a writer, researcher, and independent curator who grew up between cities in India, in Dubai, and near Ontario’s largest mall. Now based on Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract and Treaty 1 territory, their work explores spatial positionality, grief geographies, public memory, and queer ecologies as evidenced in exhibitions curated in Halifax, Winnipeg, Kitchener, Guelph, and Toronto. Shalaka has held roles at OCAD University and The Blackwood, and previously co-directed Textile, a hyper-local arts collective in Waterloo Region. As a 2025 Musagetes Fellow, they developed place-based curatorial projects that explore publication as form including the forthcoming launch of arts-writing platform The Walldog. Currently, they are one of the inaugural Visiting Curators at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka has contributed to social innovation and climate resilience projects nationally and internationally, and worked in audio journalism, planning departments, and on rooftop gardens and farms. They’ll likely point out the names of “weeds” as you walk together, and will always order dessert.