- January 5, 2018 to February 17, 2018
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In January of 2018, grunt gallery will produce the exhibition “Ghost Spring” a two-person show by Dilara Akay and Derya Akay looking at funeral practices within their own family in Turkey, passing down information from one generation to the next. This mother and son team re-creates the rituals around death for some lives who are not considered grievable. The artists will produce an installation and a series of activations that explore ways to deal with ghosts/griefs of many geographies/generations and experience ways to coexist— focusing especially on food that is presented to, and eaten for, the dead. The works in the gallery include garlands and flowers, texts and drawings as offerings to their ancestors.
By Derya Akay, Dilera Akay - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Category | 313 Programs
Exhibition- February 22, 2018 to April 21, 2018
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Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers is a series of six documented video performances by Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. This series documents interrelated performances and were produced for the camera. Commissioned by the Corpus Network and produced in association with If I Can't Dance, Amsterdam the series features the artist working both in solo performances and with an ensemble in an ethereal and captivating series of performances. For Requiem, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa developed a cycle of new performance works. Across the punctuated moments of the cycle, Ramirez-Figueroa used his body and direct action to perform a series of images related to the history of the Guatemalan Civil War. Approaching the Civil War from a personal position, he has softened this images through abstraction and humour, while attempting to use the intensity of the performance schedule to push beyond the immense force of the collective and inscribed memory of the war's history. Beyond the live performances, the cycle of works form a collective of videos.
By Naufus Ramirez Figueroa - Curated by Susan Gibb
Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers
- October 28, 2016 to December 10, 2016
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CALL To support the work of Indigenous North American women and artists through local art commissions that incite dialogue and catalyze action between individuals, communities, territories, and institutions. To stand together across sovereign territories as accomplices in awakened solidarity with all our relations both human and non. RESPONSE To ground art in responsible action, value lived experience, and demonstrate ongoing commitment to accountability and community building. To respond to re/concilliation as a present day negotiation and reconstruction of communities in the aftermath of colonial trauma. callresponseart.ca
By Cheryl L'hirondelle, Christi Belcourt, Esther Neff, Isaac Murdoch, IV Castellanos, Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, Marcia Crosby, Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard, Tanya Tagaq, Ursula Johnson - Curated by Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard, Tarah Hogue
#callresponse
- September 7, 2017 to October 14, 2017
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Technical Problem is an exhibition of mixed media drawings by Vancouver-based, Iranian-born artist Aileen Bahmanipour that explores cyclical political power and cultural identity. Bahmanipour’s work draws from Iran’s mythic history such as the story of King Zahak contained in the national epic poem Shahnameh written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE. Zahak was cursed by the kiss of the devil with two snakes that grew out of his shoulders. According to the legend, he began beheading the youth of Iran to feed their brains to his snakes. Fearful of being bitten by the snakes, Zahak sacrificed the future intellectual life of an entire nation. The works in the exhibition reference Persian miniature painting, creating an allegorical language that shifts between the political reality of Bahmanipour’s home country, narrative construction, and personal symbolism. She elicits the contradictions between Iran’s mythic past and relationship to modernity as a utopic ideal in contrast with the state’s ongoing repressive control of its people. Medical illustrations and cross sections of limbs combined with animal and abstract forms mimic the border between the interior and exterior, and dissect the past as a reflection of the present. Bahmanipour’s work is both fantastical and meticulous, expressing a process of transformation unfolding and in tension.
By Aileen Bahmanipour - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Technical Problem
- June 9, 2017 to July 29, 2017
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“Ungalaq” is an Inuvialuktun word for the west wind. When the west wind comes up, tides rise and as the earth softens, things that are staked to the ground pull lose. Suddenly untethered, dogs run free and smoke houses drift up the beach. It is a period of unpredictability and, ultimately, of re-formation. Drawing from five bodies of work, this solo exhibition will be the most extensive mounting of Gruben’s work to date. Currently a Victoria based artist, Gruben has developed a strong aesthetic and practice of working with materials linked to her home in the Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk in the North West Territories and to the Coast Salish territories of Vancouver Island. Her aesthetic practice can be seen as rippling outward from the land itself. She delves deeply into broad issues like climate change in a way that is both eloquent and pared down, pushing viewers to extend their own process of thought and interpretation, and allowing them to feel their way through each gesture of weaving, tufting, encasing, and assembling in her material process. As an Inuvialuit artist her exploration of Indigenous materials variously includes polar bear fur, seal skin and whale intestines in combination with anodized aluminum, pvc, wool and other materials associated with industry. These substances do not function in binary structure of opposing traditional and industrial materiality. Rather, Gruben’s material sense reverberates throughout her choices, conceptually linking her experiences of home to ways in which materials are reused, re-appropriated and reimagined.
By Maureen Gruben - Curated by Kyra Kordoski, Tania Willard
UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose)
- March 3, 2017 to April 15, 2017
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Brigitta Kocsis’ paintings blend realism, illustration and expressive painterly gestures in a chaotic and visually charged landscape. Her current series, Contingent Bodies, focuses on the representation of bodies in transformation – both organic and unfamiliar. The painting’s surface is used to transform energies and refabricate the body with suggestions of contamination, connectivity and displacement, reflecting Kocsis’ cultural history as a Hungarian, Romany and Canadian. Fragmented bodies emerge in the play between abstraction and figuration, embedded in perpetual rootlessness, containing exile and otherness within themselves. These polymorphic figures confront sexual and cultural categorization, recasting the body as part imaginary and part construct. Exploring notions of the cyborg and the prosthetic, these figures exist between the human and post-human, biotechnological and sexualized bodies, and the fashion industry and anime.
By Brigitta Kocsis - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Contingent Bodies
- January 13, 2017 to February 18, 2017
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Three Cities: Prayer and Protest is a shadow-based installation that investigates sites of tension, controversy, and contact within three cosmopolitan environments. Inspired by recent cities the artists have lived and worked in (including Istanbul, Montreal and Vancouver), the exhibition explores notions of prayer and protest as communal expressions of personal hope, desire, demand and outrage. Each ‘city’ becomes a palimpsest in which layers of social, cultural, economic, and political differences come into dialogue. Made from intricately cut paper sculptures, each city is presented as as “island”. These islands are explored by the viewer with the use of mobile lights created for the installation. As the viewer moves through the space, the miniature paper imagery comes alive. Large scale shadows fill the gallery walls and the viewer, who was initially towering over the fragile paper cities, is now surrounded by layers of giant shadow. The Garden of Earthly Delights: Inspired by the Hieronymus Bosch painting of the same name, this is an experience of the city as rendered in darkness. It's a ten-minute-long journey in which five viewers at a time are guided by a cued sequence of shadow projections and sound to bring a procession of paper cut-outs to life. The cityscape appears as shadows on the wall, becoming an abstraction even as its physical essence is laid bare. The artists take 16th century notions of heaven and hell and join them to a modern inquiry. This urban maze of concrete and cables: is it fantasy or nightmare? Decide for yourself as you experience the magic of light and paper. This is illusionism at its finest - refined down to a beautiful binary of black and white.
By Chris Carrière, Jaimie Robson, Maya Ersan, Mere Phantoms
Three Cities: Prayer and Protest / The Garden of Earthly Delights
- September 25, 2020 to December 12, 2020
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Vancouver-based printmaker Marlene Yuen’s explorations of Chinese Canadian labour histories have through the years taken the form of intricately produced print and paper-based media. Through ‘zines, comics, lovingly crafted artists books and – new for this exhibition – site-specific artworks, Yuen’s body of work comes off the pages and onto the walls. In precise and attentive craftsmanship, Yuen brings dimension to both the known and the overlooked histories of immigrant labour. Drawing from oral histories and archival research inspired by Yuen’s own family history, Cheap! Diligent! Faithful! acknowledges the complexities of labour and immigration in this country – and lifts up the small, remarkable details of lived experience. The exhibition includes the launch of Yuen’s new publication that explores the graphic and cultural history of Ho Sun Hing Printers which closed in 2014, after 106 years of business in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
By Marlene Yuen - Curated by Vanessa Kwan, Whess Harman
Cheap! Diligent! Faithful!
- April 2, 2020 to September 1, 2020
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For grunt gallery’s curatorial contribution to Capture’s public works series, we have selected an image from Impatiently Inclined’s series, Human Nature–Last Supper. The collective, comprised of Theo Pelmus, Kris Snowbird, and Daina Warren, have been building a series of work that connects these three artists from vastly different backgrounds by finding points of commonality through process.
By Daina Warren, Impatiently Inclined, Kris Snowbird, Theo Pelmus - Curated by Whess Harman
Human Nature – Last Supper
- June 10, 2020 to July 3, 2020
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Limeflower Heterodoxy is an exhibition by artist Sharona Franklin featuring the slow decomposition of one of her signature gelatin sculptures. With this work, Franklin takes the viewer into an exploration of healing methodologies, contrasting the different approaches of psychedelic and plant based medicine intertwined within the pharmaco-industrial complex. The installation centers the experiences of childhood rural illness, contrasted with the alien and often dehumanizing experiences of cytotoxic and pharmaceutical systems. Referred to by the artist as bioshrines, the sculptures embody tensions and contradictions held for those whose treatments include both natural medicine and—sometimes ethically controversial—biopharmaceutical care. Decomposition is an integral part of Franklin’s process, as she invites visitors to come back and revisit her sculptures over the course of an exhibition, witnessing their transformation in space, as time and organic matter collide. For the first time, a livestream video grants the viewer real time access to the transformation at any moment of the day or night. The artist records the decomposition of her work, creating two time lapse videos over the period of a month. The livestream and videos (30 minute Hi8 timelapse and 60 minute high res video with textile edition) were offered by Printed Matter as artist editions with all proceeds to benefit COVID Bail Out NYC. This installation is organized by Printed Matter, Inc. (NYC), hosted at grunt gallery, and produced with the support of VIVO Media Arts Centre.
By Sharona Franklin