Alyssa Alikpala

second site
05.09–06.14.2025
Room 2

Alyssa Alikpala’s installation second site is a site-specific assemblage in that its constituents are composed from materials that occur at specific locations. Re-contextualized and re-presented, Alikpala’s works are trace and presence, evidence and memory, impression and revelation.

Here, Alikpala is a remembrancer. She documents marks and scuffs—the movement over time of human bodies and labour—from her studio floor. She translates the ephemeral remnants of past projects into interminable materials. She immortalises the interior edges of her studio, flattening the right angle where wall meets floor and registering the base reveal between them. Alikpala gathers both residue and essence using friction, imprinting, sandcasting, and other printmaking, archival, and manufacturing processes to transfer these traces for further study and examination.

As with any translation, Alikpala’s works contain elisions, additions, interpretations, and liberties. As textured surfaces are reproduced, dainty fissures are exaggerated, others are smoothed over. Artifacts—miniscule pieces of debris—are also brought into relief, undermining the truthfulness of the representation, adding interest and provoking curiosity. Alikpala preserves what is usually absented by virtue of its insignificance. The resulting objects are another event in a sequence of actions, productions, responses, and disruptions.

Other components draw from flora extremely local to Alikpala’s journeys through an urban greenway in Toronto’s shifting west end. Non-native species line fences barricading access during construction. These works are less about memory and preservation, and more related to Alikpala’s engagement and collaboration with her surrounding ecologies: the materials of construction, the presence of flora, the shifting urban backdrop of her transits.

While Alikpala’s work can be seen as a record of change over time, it can also be understood as a response to the incessant call for repetitive reproduction and constant refresh. Her (re)collections are a record of presences and events, her documentations a provocation toward a quantum understanding of space as holding simultaneous multiple existences.

— Nehal El-Hadi