Revolving: A Reading Group

Image: Guest speakers Dr. Dallas Hunt (left) and Reyhan Yazdani (right). Courtesy of the speakers

October 30, 2021, 3:00 – 5:00 PM PDT

Register HERE.

In conjunction with Centre A’s current exhibition, Revolving: a family tale, we will host our first in-person public program since 2020. The multimedia exhibition revisits the semi-colonial history of the Iranian oil industry by Sona Safaei-Sooreh.

We are inviting Dr. Dallas Hunt and artist Reyhan Yazdani to lead a reading discussion on texts chosen by the speakers. The discussion will fall under the themes of environment and ecology, colonial history, storytelling, revolution, cultural resistance, and love.

The reading group aims to support artistic and curatorial engagement by creating a space for exploring themes of the exhibition through alternative methods.

The reading group will take place in our gallery space at Unit 205, 268 Keefer Street in the Sun Wah Centre located in the historic Chinatown on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. We will be limiting the reading group to max. 15 participants and will be following COVID-19 protocols. The readings will be sent out a week prior to the gathering.

Participants of all levels and experiences are welcome!

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative works published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018. His new book, CREELAND, is out through Nightwood Editions. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of British Columbia.

Reyhan Yazdani is an interdisciplinary artist/designer currently teaching at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her creative practice revolves around themes of embodied knowledge, language, displacement and nomadic identities, among others. Yazdani explores notions of de-centring practices, pluralistic understandings, untranslatability, loss and longing through installation, objects, social practice, and poetry.

She received a Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran in 2017 and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2019. She exhibited her works at galleries such as Seymour Art Gallery (2020) and Centre A (2019) and has been working as an Artist-in-Residence at Access Gallery (2021) and Shadbolt Art Centre (2021). Recent projects include a Poem in Distance publication purchased by Emily Carr University for the permanent Artist’s Books Collection of the library.

Please email us at [email protected] if you require any assistance.