- November 2, 2018 to November 13, 2018
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Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2018 takes place from November 2 – 13, 2018 as a series of free public events, panels, conversations, and screenings that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver. The program significantly expands on the work begun through previous archival projects: Activating the Archive and Vancouver Independent Archives Week. Taking the focus and format of these events as a starting point, Recollective broadens the context, understanding, and awareness of independent archives by exploring what is at stake when artists and arts organizations confront the tasks of arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to material history. In 2018, Recollective features perspectives and approaches to archival practice through grassroots strategies, collective organizing, hybrid models, DIY spaces, open source solutions, and counter- archives that facilitate ownership of community memory by and for community. This series of events will emphasize the reciprocal influence between contemporary culture and social movements by drawing attention to shared experiences and struggles across diverse communities.
By !Kona, Casey Wei, Christine D’onofrio, Cindy Mochizuki, Dr. Anne Murphy, Dr. Glenn Deer, Dr. JP Catungal, Dr. Sunera Thobani, Elisa Ferrari, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Josh Gabert-Doyon, Laiwan, Laura Cuthbert, Melanie Hardbattle, Raghavendra Rao K.V., Salia Joseph, Samantha Nock, Sid Chow Tan, Syrus Marcus Ware
medium | 42 Programs
Medium Film & VideoWork including film or video elements either digital or analogue, not to be applied to work that has been documented with film or video but is otherwise not film or video-based.
- November 1, 2019 to December 14, 2019
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“How do you remember the past the most?”
Equal parts family recollection, historical research and spectral diary, Coco Means Ghost forms the moving image focal point of Gabi Dao’s new installation. Rooted in Dao’s research along the Mekong Delta and her own family’s history between cultures, a sentimental dissidence employs sculpture, video and sound to put imagined contemporary and historical diasporic voices in conversation. At the centre of the exhibition is a haunting: the eponymous narrator (a ghost in the form of a coconut) resists a singular place and time, moving freely, if not lightly, through personal photographs, contemporary commentary and archival material. Other characters appear– Lan, Ong Nam, Mr.Le, Quang, An, Nguyen and Dung–and together they tell the fragmented story of Ong Dao Dua ( ‘Mr.Coconut’), a monk who founded a small, self-sustaining, anti-war community in the late 1960s-70’s on Con Phung, an island colloquially known to westerners as the “Coconut Kingdom.” Through the lens of Ong Dao Dua’s oft-mythologized character, the work becomes an avenue to explore and enmesh broader notions of memory, nationhood, belief, belonging and dreams for the future.
Dao combines the single-channel video with sonically activated sculptures that transmit her family’s narrative in another form: excerpts from “Foreign Accent Improvement” cassettes used by the artist’s parents in the 1980s. a sentimental dissidence points to texture and poetics rather than conclusive fact, and creates a landscape that at once immerses, entangles and pushes back.
1. coco means ghost: Screen & Video, 25m24s, followed by a short pause. HD video, 2.1 sound, LED lights, cans of coconut water, photograph, bench & pillows.
2. you and i, i and you: Sculptures & Audio, 6m30s, followed by a short pause. Beaded curtains, UV reducing window vinyl, transducers, tempered glass, aluminum.
Accessibility: Hearing Access: Un-captioned English audio, some subtitled Vietnamese (written in English). Sight Access: Low light conditions
By Gabi Dao - Curated by Vanessa Kwan
a sentimental dissidence
- March 5, 2019
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In 2008 Rebecca Belmore produced the video installation March 5, 1819 recreating the abduction of the Beothuk woman Demasaduit and the murder of her husband Nonosabasut by colonialist settlers in Newfoundland. This video installation is not a historical reenactment, rather the actors are in modern dress and Belmore questions what has changed over the past 200 years. March 5, 1819, was commissioned by The Rooms in St John’s and has also been exhibited in Ottawa and Toronto. Set at Red Indian Lake in central Newfoundland March 5, 1819 was filmed in Vancouver at Mount Seymour. March 5, 2019, marks the 200th anniversary of these events. It was announced earlier this year that their skulls will be returned to the Canadian Museum of History from the University of Scotland. As we grapple with reconciliation it is fitting to remember the history that brought us to this place. grunt will celebrate the re-launch rebeccabelmore.com, a website documenting Rebecca Belmore’s career over the past 32 years. The new site features content that spans Belmore’s career in all media, taking the user deep into the heart of her practice.
By Rebecca Belmore - Curated by Glenn Alteen
March 5, 1819
- May 10, 2019 to June 22, 2019
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dot.dot.dot. brings together Seoul-based artists Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo for their first presentations in Canada. Working at the intersection of media and installation, Kim and Yeo’s practices explore the omnipresence of interactive technologies and their varying effects on human experience.
By InYoung Yeo, Sejin Kim - Curated by InYoung Yeo, Vanessa Kwan
dot.dot.dot
- 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
- May 2, 2018 to May 12, 2018
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Motion Within Motion, a two-channel video installation with immersive sound, is inspired by Persian-Islamic philosophy of change. Using the theory of ‘substantial motion’ (al-harakat al-jawhariyya) by philosopher Mulla Sadrā Shirazi (1571-1641) as a starting point, Emadi employs digital video and installation technologies to challenge human-centric assumptions of change, time and motion. The work engages two distinct points of view: a non-narrative documentary filmed in Iran and an altered variation that magnifies the footage to the pixel-level. The resulting installation is both synchronized and perceptually disjointed, demanding a simultaneous reading of both cinematic time/movement and the largely abstracted constituent parts of the digital image. Zooming in and out of focus, splitting images into units and using different modalities of time and motion, Emadi’s installation reveals the inner activities of the frame – and provides experience “from a pixel’s point of view.”
By Azadeh Emadi - Curated by Laura Marks
Motion Within Motion
- March 6, 2020 to April 11, 2020
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For her first solo exhibition in Vancouver, Meagan Musseau presents a body of work from her ongoing research responding to Beothuk and Mi’kmaq visual culture. Musseau uses a multi-disciplinary practice that involves archival research, land-based action, video, drawing, and sculpture to explore land, language, and design. By telling stories about cultural belongings from the perspective of a contemporary L’nu woman living on Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), Musseau’s work transfers knowledge from archived collections into contemporary visual consciousness. A braided sculpture made during a land-based action in Musseau’s home region of Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands, NL) forms the physical and conceptual center of the exhibition. While the act of endurance required to create the 22 foot braid connects to stories and nomadic histories of the Mi’kmaq, the object itself carries the history of the land in its creation. A series of tall sculptures rendered in engraved plexiglass reference Beothuk caribou bone pendants that Musseau visited during museum research. Evoking the artist’s experience of visiting cultural belongings through plexiglass cases, the sculptures re/awaken their designs by enlarging them to a human scale and presence. A site specific wall installation integrates the material qualities of the braid with graphic elements from the pendant designs. These textures surround an image of Musseau beside one of Santu Toney, a woman living in the early 1900s with mixed Mi’kmaw and Beothuk ancestry. Musseau’s work seeks to honour Santu by highlighting the transmission of knowledge that exists between past, present, and future generations. pi’tawkewaq | our people up river presents contemporary cultural belongings that index and render tangible Musseau’s active practice of building and maintaining her relationships to land and ancestor artists. She uses her perspective to overturn colonial narratives of disappearance and instead addresses the role of interterritorial relationships between the two nations as a guiding methodology.
By Meagan Musseau - Curated by Laurie White
pi’tawkewaq | our people up river
- May 27, 2016 to June 25, 2016
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High Kicks Into the Light Forever and Ever and Ever is a new video installation by Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth Milton. Composed of a series of immersive projections that explore performative ritual and material play, the work revolves around a procession of participants meditating under the hot glow of a spotlight. Drenched in identical heavy make-up and lacquered in artificial sweat and tears, a series of ‘women’—disembodied faces displaying exaggerated markers of high femininity—form a fevered chorus-line for the camera. Melting under the heat, the performers’ make-up is a tenuous composition, eventually smeared away in a gesture of (choreographed) self-effacement. What is constructed fades, or rather, is obliterated. The make-up, so recognizable as an overstatement of gendered subjectivity, becomes a kaleidoscopic abstraction on white linen, acting as both colour field and performance document. Alongside sequences of props, costumes, and the garish refuse of novelty-store glamour, the images disarm assumptions of a composed subject, and point to the possibility of transcendence, an ecstasy in glitter.
By Elizabeth Milton - Curated by Vanessa Kwan
High Kicks Into the Light Forever and Ever and Ever
- February 25, 2016 to April 2, 2016
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Sausage Factory examines the operations of food production and how this activity has been represented in literature, industrial films, and popular cinema. A selection of related movement images are disassembled and their various motivations and structural components reconstituted to produce a series of new video works. In one instance, a set of inexpensive consumer goods haunted by physical, mimetic and mythic affinities to sausage making are summoned, to reenact a centuries old sight-gag. In another, movements captured in a tradition of scientific management are pushed through the tedious yet fantastical mill of cel animation. The resultant images collapse historical time with the time of production, and in doing so reveal uncanny movements of capital and desire.
By Stephen Wichuk, Weronika Stepien - Curated by Tarah Hogue, Vanessa Kwan
Sausage Factory
- July 21, 2016 to August 20, 2016
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Four Faces of the Moon is multi-media installation that provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the elaborate sets, puppets, and props created for the new stop motion animated film by the same name. The story is told in four chapters, which explore the reclamation of language and Nationhood, and peel back the layers of Canada’s colonial history. A personal story told through the eyes of director and writer Amanda Strong, as she connects the oral and written history of her family as well as the history of the Michif (Métis), Cree and Anishinaabe people and their cultural ties to the buffalo. Canada’s extermination agenda of the buffalo isn’t recorded as fervently as it was in the United States, yet the same tactics were used north of the border to control the original inhabitants of the land. This story seeks to uncover some of that history and establish the importance of cultural practice, resistance and language revival from a personal perspective. Artistic collaborators include: Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Raven John, Femke van Delft, Chloe Bluebird, Dora Cepic, Dusty Hagerud, William Weird, Daniel Guay, Lydia Brown, Terrance Azzuolo, Callum Paterson, Tim Daniel, Joce Weird, Ian Nakamoto, Lynn Dana Wilton, Zed Alexander, Danielle Wilson, Damien Buddy Eaglebear, Colour Sound Lab Studio, Boldly Creative, Outpost Media and Menalon Music, along with the support of many others.
By Amanda Strong - Curated by Glenn Alteen