- 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
724 Programs
Programs- January 11, 2019 to March 2, 2019
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This new series of work by Mexican Canadian artist Carlos Colín merges symbols of Latin American conceptualist art, and Latin American colonialist history, past and present, and its diaspora. Working with archives, books, footage, and audio material related to Latin American history, the artist creates a work based on photographs, text and/or audio with parallels between, arts, politics, religion, and society.
By Carlos Colín - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Strident Aesthetic. Towards a new liberation
- March 15, 2019 to April 27, 2019
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An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love; these images are about resilience and resistance. In this series, artist Kali Spitzer is photographing her community of mostly Indigenous and mixed heritage people, while challenging pre-conceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality to touch on how we can become more empathic, empowered people despite the hardships that we have endured. Spitzer uses tintype photographs to capture her subjects. Tintype or ferrotype photography was a product of the late 1800s and most popular during the US Civil War. The medium persisted into the 20th century at fairs and carnivals as tourist photography. In the 21st century, it has been revived as novelty or art photography. The tintype was the first real populist form of photography, making photographs available to working class people reaching out through popular events and gatherings.
By Kali Spitzer - Curated by Glenn Alteen
An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance
- 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
- April 19, 2019 to April 21, 2019
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Together Apart has been envisioned as a way of making and holding space for 2SQ/Indigiqueer folks to come together and to be in dialogue with one another so that we might centre the conversations we’d like to hear or that we feel have been absent in our communities. However, our intentions are also simple: to celebrate and enjoy one another’s creativity and dedication to our practices, and to recognize one another in such a way that speaks across the distances we experience in our living and movement through our worlds.
By Afuwa, Anne Riley, Arielle Twist, Bo Dyp, Cease Wyss, Chandra Melting Tallow, Demian DinéYazhi’, Edzi'u, Evan Ducharme, fabian romero, Kali Spitzer, KERUB, La Tisha Rico, Lacie Burning, Lindsay Nixon, Mourning Coup, Niilas Helander, Ostoro Petahtegoose, Riley Kucheran, Storme Webber, Vi Levitt, Whess Harman, With War - Curated by Kali Spitzer, Whess Harman
Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities
- May 25, 2017 to May 29, 2017
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grunt gallery launched of Journey to Kaho’olawe, an artist publication by Hans Winkler and T’uy’t-tanat Cease Wyss. The artist book is the result of a four year process centred on the Hawaiian Island of Kaho’olawe, a sacred site to the Hawaiians in recovery after being occupied as a practice range by the American military. Returned to the Hawaiians in the 1990s, the island is being remediated and returned to its natural state. The publication also documents the Kanaka presence in British Columbia since the late 1700s when Native Hawaiians travelled to BC with some staying and marrying into the Squamish peoples on the BC Coast and many other indigenous communities throughout the region. With texts by Wyss and historians Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Watson in addition to Hans Winkler the book represents the four year research project by the artists. In conjunction with the launch of the publication grunt gallery and the artists presented a week long series of events celebrating Kaho’olawe and the Kanaka presence in BC from May 25 to the 29th, 2017.
By Hans Winkler, T'uy't-tanat Cease Wyss - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Journey to Kaho’olawe
- July 2, 2019 to August 3, 2019
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This photographic exhibition features five large-scale digital photographs by Belmore produced in late 2017 and early 2018. The works were commissioned by grunt gallery and include witness, matriarch, mother, madonna, and keeper.
By Rebecca Belmore - Curated by Glenn Alteen
nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)
- September 6, 2019 to October 19, 2019
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Anton Cu Unjieng’s intricately taped, fired, and stacked ceramics are a response to recent political actions in his homeland in the Philippines. The Duterte regime’s mass killings have been officially classified as nanlaban, Filipino for ‘fought back.’ The stack arrangements in Cu Unjieng’s work are not only a monument to the regime’s precarious strength, but also to the possibility of fighting back.
By Anton Cu Unjieng - Curated by Glenn Alteen
A study in restraint, nanlaban
- 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