Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

// Liminal Futures //

June 8th, 2023

// Liminal Futures //

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June 24 – August 19, 2023

Curated by Diane Hau Yu Wong 

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Current Gallery Hours:

Wednesday to Saturday, 12 PM – 6 PM*

*Subject to change as per COVID-19-related protocols. Face masks or face coverings are optional during your visit.

// Liminal Futures // intends to examine the potentiality of liminality as a portal to a better future and include works by Rah Eleh, Diasporic Futurisms (Vanessa Godden and Adreienne Matheuszik), Skawennati, and Audie Murray. In mainstream post-apocalyptic visions of the future, the focus is predominantly on global catastrophes that lead to human extinction. These stories usually explicitly centre figures of whiteness as their protagonists and the survivors of the apocalypse who can save the world. In these narratives, strategies and methods to preserve the future of humanity are more concerned with protecting the future of global structures rooted in a set of social, political, and economic structures derived from Eurocentric systems of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. This can be seen in the structural absence of BIPOC bodies in mainstream science fiction, or the tokenization of these characters as a source of difference and otherness within a post-apocalyptic future that stemmed from racial contamination and racial paranoia. At the same time, these stories completely neglect to address the disproportionate effect of the eco-crisis on marginalized communities worldwide.

Instead, // Liminal Futures // centre diverse knowledge and pluralistic forms of agency that undermine the current hegemonic notion of ‘humanity’. In contrast to an apocalyptic future, they embrace nonlinear temporalities and forms of liminality to put forth multiple futures. It can create alternatives to apocalypse visions to open up the possibility for the emergence of a new pluralistic world beyond the apocalypse of colonial domination. The exhibition will address the speculative possibilities of liminal futurisms to create generative solidarities and forms of collective power. It takes into consideration the multiplicity of lived experiences and embraces knowledge from different communities that exist in the world. Post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha, in particular, has referred to liminality as a transitory, in-between state or space characterized by ambiguity, hybridity, and potential for subversion and change in his 1994 text, “Location of Culture.” Liminality identifies an environment in which cultural transformation can take place, creating sites and opportunities for major societal changes. 

At the same time, the exhibition draws on multiple cosmologies that embrace alternative temporalities in which the ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ are interwoven, where multiple intersections of time exist to imagine the possibilities of a sustainable future for all that embody mutually enhancing relations and collective wisdom. It puts forth alternative methods of examining nonlinear and equitable futures that are parallel to our own, from which we can collapse into our world to encourage steps towards making these futures our reality. The exhibition proposes a set of strategies and knowledge for hybrid beings to embrace radical temporality and liminality beyond the imagination of colonial futures. In doing so, strive away from the imposition of differences amongst marginalized communities to imagine and build collective futures through solidarity and mutually enhancing relationships for future generations. 

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Artist Biography

Rah Eleh is a video, digital and performance artist and a PhD candidate at the die Angewandte in Vienna, Austria. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at spaces including: Venice Biennale (ECC Palazzo Mora), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Museum London, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), Pao Festival (Oslo, Norway), Kunst Am Spreeknie (Berlin, Germany), Kunsthaus Graz Museum (Graz, Austria), and Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including: Longlisted for the 2023 Sobey Art Award, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, several CCA, OAC and Toronto Arts Council grants, and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship for her MFA and her PhD. She has been awarded several residencies including the Intergenerational LGBTQ Artist Residency (Toronto Island, 2019), Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the Artslant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris).

Diasporic Futurisms is a collaborative curatorial team comprised of Adrienne Matheuszik and Vanessa Godden. This collaborative curatorial endeavor works to create space for Indigenous, Black and racialized peoples whose artworks are based in the genre of diasporic futurisms.

Matheuszik and Godden define diasporic futurisms as the presentation of alternative perspectives of the present, predictions of the future, and creative approaches to reimagining the past. Within the movement of diasporic futurisms, the destabilization of white-supremacy, colonisation, and capitalism in relation to the lives of diasporic peoples are a primary concern. In diasporic futurisms, these concerns are materialized through the genres of Fantasy, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and related subgenres.

The collaborative team, Diasporic Futurisms is radically reimaging and reimagining IBPoC diasporic futurisms in the arts through the impact of a global pandemic and the increased visibility of police brutality. Diasporic Futurisms is continually working to build immersive and inclusive arts experiences that radically resist patriarchal, heteronormative, ableist, and racist oppression.

Adrienne Matheuszik is a mixed Jamaican & settler-canadian interdisciplinary artist in Toronto. Adrienne has had unsupervised access to the internet since she was nine years old. She uses computers to make art — video, physical computing, creative coding & 3D design — which usually result in interactive installations, augmented and virtual reality, short film and video. Adrienne’s work explores ideas of representation & identity online and IRL. She is interested in speculative futures and using sci-fi to examine the possibility of the post-colonial.

Adrienne has an MFA from OCAD University from the Interdisciplinary Masters of Art Media and Design Graduate program (2019), and a BFA from University of Ottawa with a specialisation in New Media Art (2014).

Vanessa Godden (they, them) is a queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist, educator, and curator. They are based in Pickering, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nations, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Godden’s transdisciplinary practice explores how personal histories and the body in relation to geographic space can be conveyed through oral and somatic storytelling in art. They draw from their multi-ethnic diasporic experiences navigating the world to build multi-sensory performances, videos, sound installations, book art pieces, and net-art that unfurl the impacts of trauma on the body, connections to community, and tethers to culture.

Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her machinimas, still images, textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others. Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research-creation network based at Concordia University, where she received her BFA. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.

Audie Murray is a relative, dreamer, skin-stitcher and Michif visual artist based in Oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan; Treaty 4 territory). 

Her practice is informed by the process of making and visiting to explore themes of contemporary culture, embodied experiences and lived dualities. This way of working assists with the recentering of our collective connection to the body, ancestral knowledge systems, time and space. She has exhibited widely, including at the Independent Art Fair, NYC; The Vancouver Art Gallery; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; and the Anchorage Museum. Murray is represented by Fazakas Gallery, located on Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam territory (Vancouver, B.C.).

Curator Biography

Diane Hau Yu Wong (She/Her) is a Cantonese-Canadian emerging curator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish First Nations. She received her BFA in Art History from Concordia University and is currently an MA Candidate in the Critical Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Programming Manager at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has curated exhibitions at espace pop, Art Matters Festival, Nuit Blanche, articule, and Centre A. She was the inaugural recipient of the articule x MAI Curatorial Mentorship in 2020/2022 and the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency program.

Her curatorial practice and research are broadly based on the intersection between technology and new media art, predominantly focusing on the world-building possibilities of different iterations of Futurism, such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and Asian Futurism. She is particularly interested in examining the depiction of Asian bodies as cyborgs and non-humans in science fiction through Techno-Orientalism and the current development of Asian Futurism.

With support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.

Centre A would like to acknowledge the generous support of Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and Vancouver City Council for the realization of this exhibition.

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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.

Down a Dark Stairwell (2020) Screening and Panel Discussion

May 17th, 2023

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

May 13th, 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

May 4th, 2023

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

April 13th, 2023

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

April 13th, 2023

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.

Capture Public Art 2023: Kvet Nguyen

March 22nd, 2023

Capture Public Art: Kvet Nguyen

April 1 – August 31, 2023

Curated by former Executive Director/Curator Henry Heng Lu 

King Edward Station

 

Courtesy of the artist:

Kvet Nguyen’s work demonstrates an embodied sense of searching within the self. For her photo series You are allowed to mix apples and pears here, assembles a range of objects – primarily organic – of various sculptural forms and photographs them against backdrops of domestic settings. The objects, many of which are often found in diasporic cooking, are posed with others with apparently different cultural roots; the constructed compositions display dexterity, elegance, and discomfort. These compositions symbolize the act of “blending in” performed by Nguyen’s family following their immigration to Slovakia from Vietnam several decades ago, and simultaneously evoke a sense of uncertainty through the strange-yet-familiar quality of the collages. The subtle approach to familiarity is aided by elegant lighting, surroundings, and colour choices, seemingly creating a metaphor for becoming, unbecoming, and rebecoming.

Ultimately, You are allowed to mix apples and pears here is a family portrait of Nguyen’s parents and herself that speaks to the prolonged process of navigating cultures and settling in.

Presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC