Images credits
Feature images - Miles Rufelds, Salvage Archives (stills), 2024. Digital video with sound. 42:00 mins. Courtesy of the Artist.
Miles Rufelds bio photo, courtesy of the Artist.
Angel Callander bio photo provided by the Author.
Miles Rufelds: Salvage Archives
8 February to 1 June 2025
Curated by Darryn Doull
Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems.
Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste.
As both narrators’ grandiose overtures slowly narrow, contort, or fizzle out, the film meditates on the failures of narrativity, synthesizing themes of digital loneliness, class alienation, capitalist paranoia, and the tragic arc of histories constrained by these forces.
KWAG is proud to share that we are commissioning a critical text for this exhibition by author Angel Callander. This text will be available in a special Exhibition Resource Guide that will become available once the exhibition opens.
Related Programming:
Exhibition Opening and Artist Talk
Miles Rufelds in discussion with Angel Callander
Saturday 8 February, 2:00 p.m.
FREE | Register Online
About the artist
Miles Rufelds is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Toronto. He 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’ research-based practice mixes archival investigation with strategies of speculative- and para-fiction, considering how forms of narrativity mediate the operations of systemic power and exploitation. His projects often focus on stories where histories of science, industry, labour, and war intersect with artistic, political, or esoteric subcultures.
Rufelds has participated in exhibitions and screenings nationally and internationally, including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Blackwood Gallery, PAVED Arts, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Karsh-Masson Gallery, ArtworxTO, and the SIM Gallery. Rufelds is also a co- founder and co-director of Toronto gallery ‘the plumb’.
About the author
Angel Callander is a writer and editor in Toronto. Currently she is a PhD candidate in art history and visual culture at York University. She holds a BA in art history from the University of Guelph and an MA in art history and visual culture from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her work takes a historical materialist approach to subjects such as technology, feminism, structures of power, labour, and cultural production. Her writing can be found in publications such as CBC Arts, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Esse arts + opinions, and BlackFlash among others, as well as in Imagining Futures of Experimental Media (Pleasure Dome, NIMAC & OddSite Arts, 2023), Architecture and the Smart City (Routledge, 2020), and Interface Critique (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016).
Artist Talks sponsored by Momentum Developments and Sorbara Law.
Curatorial Tours are generously sponsored by the Gamble Family.
