Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Down a Dark Stairwell (2020) Screening and Panel Discussion

Screening and Panel Discussion: Down a Dark Stairwell (2020)

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Screening: Down a Dark Stairwell (2020)

Thursday, June 1, 2023

4 PM

as part of The Living Room 2.0: Intimate Entanglements

Register HERE. 

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Panel Discussion: Ursula Liang, Rachel Lau, Tonye Aganaba

Friday, June 2, 2023

1 PM PDT

Zoom 

Register HERE. 

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Join us for a free screening of Down a Dark Stairwell, the critically acclaimed documentary feature by Ursula Liang which takes an intimate look at the 2014 incident and its aftermath. The screening will be followed by a virtual panel discussion, with the filmmaker and artist-organizers Rachel Lau and Tonye Aganaba. 

The killing of Akai Gurley in 2014 by the police officer Peter Liang, and Liang’s subsequent conviction, incited protests from Black and Asian communities across the United States and Canada. Today, almost ten years later, the story remains relevant as ever in the wake of COVID-19, with the rise of anti-Asian sentiments and continuation of anti-Black police violence. What can we learn from revisiting this historical case? How can our communities take care of one another in the spirit of collective justice and solidarity? 

About the film:

When a Chinese-American police officer kills an innocent, unarmed Black man in a darkened stairwell of a New York City housing project, it sets off a firestorm of emotion and a passionate quest for accountability. When he becomes the first NYPD officer convicted of an on-duty shooting in over a decade, the fight for justice becomes complicated, igniting one of the largest Asian-American protests in history and disrupting a legacy of solidarity.

Speaker Biography:

Ursula Liang is an award-winning director and producer with 25 years of experience in storytelling. Her debut feature, 9-Man, was broadcast on public television and called “an absorbing documentary” by the New York Times. Her second film, Down a Dark Stairwell, had its premiere at True/False and was called “a vital picture of a tumultuous time” by Vox. Her latest documentary, Jeanette Lee Vs., is part of ESPN’s acclaimed 30 for 30 series. Her work has been supported by ITVS, Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Firelight Media, and the Center for Asian American Media. Before becoming a filmmaker, Ursula held staff positions at The New York Times Op-Docs, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, Asia Pacific Forum and Hyphen magazine. She also produced for television (UFC Primetime, NBC Spartan Ultimate Team Challenge). Ursula is a member of Film Fatales, A-DOC, IDD, and is the Vice President of Brown Girls Doc Mafia. She is from Newton, Mass. and currently freelances from Oakland, Calif. 

Rachel Lau is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and radio producer based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, colonially known as “Vancouver”. Inspired by the tenderness and strength of queer and racialized communities, they create work that embraces feeling and communality. Their current practice includes sound art, poetry, photography, drawing, and zine-making. With friends, they organize Queer Reads Library, a mobile library of queer books and zines based in Hong Kong and Vancouver.

Tonye Aganaba is a Black African immigrant and uninvited settler living on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish & Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. They were born and raised in London, England but have always called the lands of their ancestors colonially known as Zimbabwe and Nigeria, home. Today, Tonye is one of two Criminalization & Policing Campaigners at Pivot Legal Society – working alongside an incredible team of lawyers, campaigners, and organizers grappling with the contradictory and colonial nature of Canadian law, and using it strategically to bring cases that will help us co-create an equitable and just society. 

Poster of film image from PBS. Photo of Rachel Lau and Ursula Liang, courtesy of respective speakers. Photo of Tonye Aganaba by Lorne Clarke.


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected]. As the workshop will take place in the format of a Zoom Meeting, audio transcripts will be available upon request.

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Annual General Meeting 2023

Annual General Meeting 2023

4 5 PM PDT

Hybrid; Centre A & Zoom 

Members are welcomed to register HERE

Centre A invites all our members to join us for our Annual General Meeting 2023. Join us in-person at our gallery, or online through Zoom as we celebrate our achievements from the past year and provide a sneak peek of what we have in store for the rest of the year.

Centre A memberships are available here, or alternatively, can be purchased in-person!


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Artist Conversation: TJ Felix and S F Ho

Artist Conversation: TJ Felix & S F Ho

Saturday, May 20, 2023

1 3 PM

Centre A Reading Room

as part of The Living Room 2.0: Intimate Entanglements  

We are inviting artists TJ Felix and S F Ho for an artist conversation, as part of The Living Room 2.0: Intimate Entanglements. The talk aims to critically examine the equity-promoting, accessibility-oriented mandates of non-profit public art galleries and the broader non-profit arts institutional infrastructure that supports them. On a secondary layer, the discussion will touch upon gentrification in Chinatown and the Downtown EastSide. 

Artist Biography:

TJ Felix is a two-spirit Qelmucw from the Splatsin region of Secwepemculecw as well as a musician, multidisciplinary artist, colonial law breaker, drug user rights advocate & english language unlerner amongst many other things. They are currently missing home and paying absurdly high rent on the stolen lands of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

S F Ho is an artist living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. They’re cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring.They’ve published a novella about aliens and love called George the Parasite.

Images courtesy of the artists. 

Find out more about the exhibition HERE.


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Film Screening: NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV

Film Screening | NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV (2023)

Saturday, May 6, 2023

3:30 – 6 PM

Centre A

as part of The Living Room.2.0: Intimate Entanglements, and in partnership with Films We Like. 

NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV (2023)

Running Time: 109 minutes

Language: English

Not Rated. 

Directed by Amanda Kim

We are pleased to announce the screening of NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV (2023), a film by Amanda Kim and narrated by Steven Yeun. As part of The Living Room 2.0: Intimate Entanglements, we have partnered up with Films We Like to present a screening of the documentary of acclaimed artist Nam June Paik at our gallery space.

Here is a synopsis, courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment:

The George Washington of Video Art” … “Cultural Terrorist” … “Citizen Zero of the Electronic Superhighway” … But who really was Nam June Paik, pillar of the American avant-garde in the 20th century and arguably the most famous Korean artist in modern history? Director Amanda Kim tells, for the first time, the story of Paik’s meteoric rise in the New York art scene and his Nostradamus-like visions of a future in which “everybody will have his own TV channel.” Thanks to social media, Paik’s future is now our present, and NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV shows us how we got here.

Amanda Kim’s documentary charts Paik’s artistic evolution by tracing his formative education in Munich and his life-changing encounter with avant-garde musician John Cage, through his immigration to New York City and collaboration with the seminal experimental Fluxus movement, into his revolutionary work with video art—including his radical public television broadcasts of “Global Groove” in 1973 and “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell” in 1984—and beyond into Paik’s lasting influence on the art world and his predictions of our technological future.

Featuring an extensive archive of performance footage, original interviews from Paik’s contemporaries and collaborators, and a voiceover narration of Nam June Paik’s writings read by Executive Producer Steven Yeun (Minari, Nope), NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV is a timely meditation on the contradictory ways in which technology elicits both fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding.

About Nam June Paik:

“Before TikToks and Reels there was the video art movement, massively influenced by revolutionary artist and pioneer Nam June Paik.” – Films We Like. Born in 1932 in Seoul, the documentary tells the story of the Korean-American artist who has become one of the most influential artist and pioneer of Video art, at the heart of the 20th century modern art movement in New York.

The screening is open to all! RSVP on Eventbrite HERE.

 

 

 

 


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Ominous Chaos: Artists Talk/Curator’s Tour

Artists’ Talk/ Curator’s Tour

Saturday, April 29, 2023

1 – 2:30 PM

No registration required. 

As part of Centre A’s current exhibition, Ominous Chaos, we invite you to join artists Homa Khosravi and Marzieh Mosavarzadeh, and curator Bahar Mohazabnia for an artists talk and curator’s tour.

Ominous Chaos looks at the peculiar, the uncanny and the grotesque through the works of Homa Khosravi and Marzieh Mosavarzadeh. Approaching the subject with levity, the exhibition interrogates mechanisms of control placed on the body. The body is malleable, constantly shifting, rearranging and reconstructing: it is a vessel of labor and memory. Situating the body through whimsical comicality, this exhibition asks: do these notions become suspended within the grotesque? Is the notion of chance a mediator in the unresolved questions of bodily autonomy and docility?

Find out more about the exhibition HERE.

Image credits on poster: Image of Homa Khosravi: photo by Niloufar Samadi (left). Image of Marzieh Mosavarzadeh: photo by Mohsen Kamalzadeh (middle). Image of Bahar Mohazabnia: photo by Adam Flewelling (right). 


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Saturday, March 18, 2023

1 – 5 PM PST

Register HERE.

The last event of our Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023, is the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon! We are wrapping up the three-part event with a Wikipedia workshop, where we will edit articles for women, 2SLGBTQI+, gender non-binary, people of color, Black and Indigenous artists, curators, and organizations, as well as Feminist and activist art movements. 

In solidarity with the women and girls of Iran who continue to courageously protest for their fundamental human rights, Centre A will place an emphasis on creating new pages and updating existing pages on Iranian artists. 

In the meantime, feel free to sign-up and join our Wikipedia Dashboard. You’re welcome to get started anytime throughout March to edit and add articles, prior to and after the event. 

Refreshment and childcare will be provided (please email [email protected] before March 11, 2023)

Please bring your own electronic device!


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023: TFW No Institutional Access: Independent Research Workshop

Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023: TFW No Institutional Access: Independent Research Workshop

Saturday, March 11, 2023

1 – 2:30 PM PST

Register HERE.

In a world of paywalled articles and inaccessible academia, research without institutional means is often difficult and laborious. 

In this workshop, Centre A’s Library Assistant Coco Zhou will share tips and tricks for accessing books and journals for independent scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Join us to learn about community archives, shadow libraries, open repositories, and more. Special attention will be given to reading materials related to liberation struggles in Iran and broadly, the MENA region. 

Participants will be equipped with a multitude of resources and can expect to leave with a better understanding of how independent research can also be politicized.


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.